9.
Between forms of
non-choice: Adorno’s criticism of serialism and aleatory as techniques that
obliterated the decision-making subject
When I read The Classical Revolution a few years
ago I ended up moving from that book to what ended up being about half a dozen
books by Adorno. I eventually got to reading a few books by Roger
Scruton, so I have made a point of reading a few books by Future Symphony
Institute authors in the last few years. One of the ironies of my reading
has been discovering that Scruton and Borstlap have leveled charges against
serialism and aleatory as musical styles that lack musical substance and
expressive humanity that were, in sum, made half a century ago by none other
than Theodore Adorno.
The irony of all of this, which I hope to demonstrate, is that the
legacy of Adorno on aesthetics as a philosophical enterprise may live on a bit
more in the work of Roger Scruton than in those who have appropriated ideas
from the Frankfurt school in order to praise popular music as a new art
music. Now I think that, ultimately, Adorno was spectacularly wrong in a
number of his assertions about the exhaustion of tonality and the non-art
status of jazz but I don't want to get into all of that.
But another irony is that the criticisms Borstlap and Scruton made about the work of Stockhausen and Boulez were put in an even more vitriolic form half a century ago by ... Adorno.
I want
to highlight the ways in which Adorno criticized both serialism of the Boulez
variety and aleatoric music of the John Cage variety on the basis of a core
objection to both musical techniques.
But first ... we have to get to his assertion that these
techniques were developed in response to the crisis of the lost legitimacy of
more traditional tonal musical language.
Essays on Music: Selected,
with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert; new translations by
Susan H. Gillespie
Theodore Adorno
University of California
Press
ISBN 0-520-22672-0
ISBN 0-520-23159-7
(c) 2002 by Regents of
University of California
Difficulties (1967)
page 648
The methods that are linked
to the traditional language of music have become retrospectively problematic as
a result of those that were discovered later--namely, they have become
schematic. One hears, through what is newer, weaknesses of the old that were
once hidden. There are very many things that sound stereotyped that were not
stereotyped at the time. Richard Wagner, who was very alert in these matters, already registered this. Disrespectfully,
but forthrightly, he said that in some of Mozart's pieces he could hear the
dishes clatter on the table--Tafelmusik,
even when it was by no means intended as such. It was possible to follow this
schema as long as it was not evident as such, as long as it was still of a
piece with the self-evident preconditions of composing. But once composing, and
the relationship of the composer to the schemas, has lost its virginity, then
the schemas not only emerge baldly and annoyingly, but lead in many places to
anomalies, contradict the moments that have meanwhile been emancipated. ...
... The person who commits
himself to what is older only out of despair at the difficulties of the new is
not comforted, but becomes the victim of his own helpless nostalgia for a
better era that, finally, never actually existed.
Adorno concluded, or maybe it is better said asserted, that once
schemas were recognized for what they were it was no longer possible to use
them legitimately. Once the clichés lurking beneath what sounds original can be
heard, Adorno seemed to be saying, all you could hear was the underlying
clichés.
An implication of this kind of judgment on Adorno’s part in light of
the era of mechanical recording is that an Adorno style range of prohibitions
could expand to as many things as a person can hear on recordings. Schemas can be discerned in all sorts of
styles and then, once identified as such, cast aside. Those who embraced the old, recognizable
styles for want of finding something “new” were presented as helplessly
nostalgic for bygone days that never really were. But then what about those who commit to older
styles not out of despair but out of a certainty that what is older isn’t exhausted
and that what someone like Adorno might regard as schematic doesn’t have to be
so?
Adorno seemed to have a sense that not everyone who might be regarded
as conservative was exactly so from “despair”.
page 648
On the other hand, one
should not dispense with reactionary objections in the manner of an apologist,
but should learn the measure of correct insights that they offer, which so
frequently give them the advantage over moderate, progressive cultural
liberalism. ...
So … Adorno seemed to think
there were “reactionary” types who objected to more modern styles whose
criticisms should be taken seriously; that there was a measure of correct
insights those reactionaries had to offer which gave them the advantage over
moderate, progressive cultural liberalism.
What, exactly? Well, here it
seems fitting to joke that we wouldn’t be talking about Adorno if we were
beyond all doubt as to what it was he was getting at.
Let me propose a possibility, there is a kind of moderate progressive
cultural liberalism that, here in the age we’re in now, prefers to embrace this
or that essentialist race narrative of music being white or black and by
extension being authentic or inauthentic based on modes of racial narrative
identity that altogether avoid the possibilities that can be explore by
considering how many styles, whatever their respective differences in rhythm
and pitch organization, still evolved in the wake of the standardization of
equal tempered tuning. There can be a
new mythology in which urban black music is held up as authentic over against
an old authentic that was handed down by way of music pedagogy and musical
canon formation. It’s not that there
aren’t new canons or that canons will stop being made, of course; the way
Raymond Knapp put it in his monograph on Haydn, camp and the legacy of German
Idealism was to point out that rock and jazz critics transposed the ideals of
authenticity and raw expression and unmediated Romanticist heart from the
symphonic and salon traditions to blues, jazz and rock and roll.
To the extent that Adorno saw that conservatives could more clearly see
what might be amiss in contemporary music, he seemed to claim that a
conservative with enough grasp of musical technique in a given range of styles
could better identify what was missing from contemporary styles than moderately
liberal sorts whose commitment was to some form of liberalism rather than to
artistic disciplines. Was Adorno capable
of being a haughty and condescending sort?
Obviously … but his admonition that there were things in aesthetics that
liberalism in general would fail to engage that conservatives could be better
at might be worth keeping in mind. After
all, if Roger Scruton is a philosopher known to be concerned with matters of
aesthetics and also for being conservative … Adorno might have, if you will,
warned us all ahead of time that someone like Roger Scruton was going to be
better at highlighting what was wrong with modernist art forms.
Although, as we’ll see, Adorno managed to say much about the problems
of high modernist styles in his own day.
pages 649-650
Today, the discrepancy
between the subjective state of composition and the technical development that
is identified by catchwords like integral composition and electronics has grown
infinite. Compositional subject and compositional objectivity face each other
across an abyss. This often leads to an
opposite result compared to the previous generation. Composers frequently capitulate to the means,
which they must utilize without really composing with them. Hence the first
difficulty would be to achieve an appropriate relationship to the state of
technique, either by the composers utilizing and forming the latter in
accordance with the state of their own consciousness, or by their pushing their
self-criticism so far that they catch up with the state of technique. How this should be done is something for
which there are no general rules. ...
page 651
... Experimental, in the
legitimate sense, means nothing other than art's self-conscious power of
resistance against what is conventionally forced upon it from the outside. ...
To attempt to unpack these claims a bit, Adorno was pointing out that
the gap between subjective decision-making in composing and “objective” means
at the disposal of a composer had increased; the chasm between what the
“subject” could do with the “object” had grown, particularly in the wake of the
schematic nature of tonality being shown up for all of its “exhaustion”.
The “state of technique” reminds me of any number of things from
Jacques Ellul about the problem of “technique” as an article of faith, and of
things he wrote about in The Empire of
Non-Sense regarding technocratic art in technocratic societies. Since for the moment I’m focusing on Adorno,
however, it’s to Adorno I will, again, turn.
Adorno described the nature of what he saw as the problem of
contemporary music in surprisingly clear and simple terms when he wrote this:
page 652
... The paradoxical
difficulty of all music today is that every music that is written is subject to
the compulsion to create its own language for itself, while language, as
something that by virtue of its own concept exists beyond and outside of
composition, as something that carries it, cannot be created purely by the will
of the individual.
In another passage he likened the challenge of contemporary art to a
playwright having to birth his own actors, teach them language, and create the
materials from which they would perform.
That’s a bit absurd but it gets at the larger assertion that the trouble
“today” is that every music that could be written is written such that the
composer must create a musical language from scratch despite the fact that
language by its very nature is impossible to create in such a way. This was a point that would later be observed
by Leonard B. Meyer in his monograph on music in the Romantic era and I’ll get
to Meyer’s comments eventually.
Just when it would seem Adorno has simply specified that the problem
with contemporary music is that each composer has to invent a musical language
from scratch that can avoid the clichés of bygone eras, he introduced another
problem—language develops in communal and social ways and yet …
page 653
... Everything that in music
attributes to itself the ethos of community inclines toward totalitarian forms
of society. The difficulties of composing can be mastered, not by casting
sidelong glances at a social space, even as Brecht still did, but, if at all,
then only by proceeding from the thing itself--by giving the compositions
themselves such a compelling quality that as a result they acquire an
objectivity that would also, ultimately, partake of social meaning after all.
Without this trust, as problematic as it may be, it is no longer possible to
write a single note. ...
Okay but for those who don’t get what that is, what it entails, this
can constitute a double bind, or it can be a double bind for those who do
understand what those statements mean.
I.e. populist bids at clear, simple and direct communication constitute
totalitarian bids in the arts … but … somehow … compositions can be given “such
a compelling quality that as a result they acquire an objectivity that would
… partake of social meaning after all.” Yes, well, whatever that means.
I am going to pass that set of statements by as vapid condescension and
move along to something else Adorno mentioned because it is at this next point
Adorno articulates why he regards
the emergence of what Ellul would have called technocratic art as having such
an enervating effect on the arts:
page 654
If one examines the musical
development since, say, 1920, as a whole from the perspective that I have
identified here, the developments that are to be taken seriously are almost
exclusively efforts to develop, out of the form of musical objectivity, i.e.,
from the material, idiom and technique, methods of proceeding that relieve the subject, which no longer has
confidence in itself alone, because it is bent over and crushed by all those
difficulties. The musical history of the past forty years seems to me to be in
large part a history of attempts at musical relief. ...
New, modernist art evolved in such a way as to relieve the subject of
the responsibility of making artistic decisions. Sure, Adorno regarded tonality as “spent” but
he did not therefore advocate that people then develop techniques the purpose
of which was to ensure by way of exclusion making artistic decisions that could
preclude all of the clichés and schemata of the Romantic era and earlier simply
by way of the rejection or abjection of all previously known clichés. A compositional technique devoted to the
exclusion of things considered cliché would, at length, generate clichés all
its own on the one hand and, on the other, would do something more dangerous,
relieving those subjects (i.e. people) who resorted to these new techniques of
modernist composition from doing the most important thing in art-making, making
decisions.
It is at this point it seems best to simply quote Adorno as extensively
as he chose to address what he regarded as the fatal problem with the
development of integral or total serialism:
page 656
... The serial principle,
from the perspective of twelve-tone music, means that everything that projected
heterogeneously into what was composed and pre-formed by
twelve-tone-ness--everything independent of the twelve-tone technique, all the
material and structural traces of the old tonal idiom, are removed. Stockhausen formulated this accurately and
strikingly when he said that in terms of his musical language Schoenberg,
despite all the innovations, was actually still tonal. The serial school wanted to radicalize the twelve-tone principle, which
they regarded, in a sense, as a merely partial ordering of the materials. They wanted to extend it to all the musical
dimensions, to elevate it to totality. Absolutely everything is to be
determined, even the dimensions of rhythm, meter, tonal color, and overall
form, which in Schoenberg had still been free. [emphasis added] In doing
so, the serial composers took as their starting point the thesis that because
all musical phenomena, including pitch and tonal color, are, in their
acoustical regularity, ultimately temporal relations, they must all be able to
be reduced compositionally to a single common denominator--time. From a series' given, original material,
which should be as brief as possible, everything--every note, every rest,
duration, pitch, color should strictly follow. [emphasis added] It may
remain open whether the equation actually works; whether one can simply
identify objective physical time, according to the rate of vibration and
overtone relations, with musical time, the feeling of musical duration, which
is essentially subjectively mediated.
(pages 656-657) The serial
composers encountered this problem a long time ago. The most advanced among
them, Boulez and Stockhausen, are laboring at it with great intensity. What is
of greater concern to me is the idea of total determination as such. It is
already implicit in the twelve-tone technique, to the extent that it is not
clear why this and that dimension should be strictly determined in it, and
others not. Accordingly, one may perhaps say that the serialists did not
arbitrarily concoct mathematicizations of music, but confirmed a development
that Max Weber, in the sociology of music, identified as the overall tendency
of more recent musical history--the progressive rationalization of music. It is said to have reached its fulfillment in
integral construction. If from a given
basic material absolutely everything else, in fact, were to follow, then this
would be the greatest relief of the composer that can possibly be imagined. He
would then only have to obey what is contained in his series, and would be
delivered from all cares.
But this does not leave one with a good feeling. [emphasis
added] The reification that is already perceptible in the twelve-tone
technique, the disempowerment of the living, listening act as the authentic
constituent of music, is so intensified that it threatens to destroy all
meaningful context. I recall a young
composer who brought me a composition in Darmstadt, perhaps as much as fourteen
years ago, that appeared to me as the craziest gibberish. You couldn't make out
any way up and down, front and back, logic and setting--no articulation of the
phenomenon at all that you could grasp. When I asked him how everything related
to everything else, what the musical meaning of a phrase was, where it ended
and began, and other such elementary questions about structure, the young man
demonstrated to me that some number of pages later there was a pause that
corresponded to a single note in a particular place, and so on in that
vein. He had truly, as Philistine
enemies envision it, reduced the whole thing to a mathematic example, which may
have even been correct--it was too boring for me to figure it out--but which
absolutely no longer translated into any recognizable and compelling musical
context. The subject, on which music is thrown back in the absence of a social
space, and which is supposed to be relieved by all these machinations, is not
only relieved but virtually eliminated. [emphasis added] But along with it
also the control that it exercises and that helps to constitute musical
objectivity. If it were seriously just a
matter of composing out what a series like this contains within it, then--the
joke is as cheap as the thing itself--one could compose better with an
electronic computer than by troubling a composer. The help he is offered
threatens to overwhelm him. He is subjected to a set of laws that are alien to
him and that he can scarcely catch up with. The resulting music, however,
becomes something deaf and vacant.[emphasis added] ...
I have over the years heard it said that you can’t teach music composition
or that a musical style cannot be taught.
I find this assertion specious at best and fraudulent at worst but I do
believe there is a more positive way to articulate what these bromides may be
aiming to describe. You can be taught
all kinds of things about all kinds of styles but in the end you must make a
decision and no amount of theoretical instruction or formal training ever takes
the place of making a decision. Adorno
regarded the evolution of total or integral serialism as a style that, once codified,
no longer needed human beings to make decisions. This is the same Adorno who at one point
championed Schoenberg but here he is in the later 1960s inveighing against
total serialism as advocated by Boulez and Stockhausen and providing a pointed
philosophical objection to the very conceit of serialism. This is the kind of
music that can be written by machines,
entities bereft of human consciousness.
That far Adorno has a point that has been recycled by writers like
Roger Scruton and John Borstlap who, perhaps ironically, have retained a range
of arguments against total serialism completely indebted to Adorno, whose work
they have regarded as having had a singularly pernicious influence on Western
classical music in the post-World War II era in Europe. Yet here we can see that Adorno’s assessment
of serialism was, on the whole, pretty damning.
Neither, we’ll soon see, did he believe John Cage’s alternative
provided anything Adorno considered a viable alternative:
page 658
Into this situation of serialism
barged John Cage; it explains the extraordinary effect he had. His principle of
chance, which is familiar to you under the name of aleatory music, wants to
break out of the total determinism, the integral, obligatory musical ideal of
the serial school. He, the American, was not pressured in the same way, not
compelled by the same historical necessity as the musicians of the European
tradition, who exist within the context of the obligatory style, the general
onward march of the rationalization of music. But even the principle of indeterminacy that Cage introduced remained
as alien to the ego as its apparent opposite, serialism. It, too, belongs in the category of relief
for the weakened ego. [emphasis added] ...
... The Hungarian composer
Gyorgy Ligeti, who is as perceptive as he is truly original and significant,
observed correctly that in their effect the extremes of absolute determination
and absolute chance coincide. Statistical generality becomes the law of
composition, a law that is alien to the ego. Certainly the absolute
indeterminacy of Cage and his school is not exhausted in it. ...
So John Cage’s aleatoric music obliterated the decision-making ego as
completely as did the integral serialism of Boulez or a Stockhausen in Adorno’s
estimation. Okay, well, we know that
Adorno rejected any possibility that a fusion of improvisational decisions over
modified schemas was an acceptable option because he rejected the artistic
viability of jazz but I would suggest that this was one of Adorno’s grand
mistakes, and it’s a mistake that people across the proverbial left and right
can, if on almost nothing else, basically agree about.
The other thing about which there is a potential consensus is Adorno’s
observation that total serialism of the Boulezian variety did not, in the end,
amount to something that was going to displace earlier musical idioms. If Boulez were to blow up the opera houses he
was not, so far as Adorno could tell, composing anything musically significant
enough to take up residence in any new performing spaces:
page 659
... Until now, integration
frequently has become impoverishment. One can observe, along with an extreme
increase in compositional means, a kind of regression to homophony. As I
described this, borrowing an expression of Boulez's, blocks are being added
together rather than lines being drawn. Hardly any harmonic tensions are
created; hardly any complementary harmonies; hardly any monodonic, much less
polyphonic lines. This shrinkage is out
of all proportion to the compositional expenditure of means and construction.
... Frequently a music is assembled
that actually doesn't want to go anywhere. ...
As Jacques Ellul put it, we are witnessing art made by elites for
elites and that those without the modicum of education necessary to understand
how or why technocratic art in a technocratic society could even be recognized
as such are left out in the cold.
Adorno wrapped up his criticism of both serialist and aleatoric music
by saying:
page 660
... Music today sees itself
faced with an alternative, that between the fetishism of the material and the
process, on the one hand, and unfettered chance on the other. ...
Yet it does not seem that difficult to imagine, fifty years after the
death of Adorno, that Adorno was ultimately trapped in the intellectual
legacies of the Romantic era. David P.
Roberts argued as much across three books, most explicitly in Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory After Adorno and Dialectic of Romanticism. Adorno had
objections to Stravinsky’s music and to music he declared to be music about
music, but Adorno turned out to be wrong, Stravinsky’s arch detachment may have
seemed unacceptably cynical and too fascist for Adorno, but we live in an era
of musical culture in which sly and knowing appropriation has become so common
it saturates popular music; that pastiche has come up for discussion in things
regarded as art music could invite questions as to whether someone like Adorno
could realistically say we could cast off all conventions.
We had enough revolutions in musical styles and ways of conceiving
music in the twentieth century the more interesting and inspiring work, I
think, is not in continuously rejecting the old conventions or artistic norms
but in finding ways to gently and subtly recalibrating them. Breaking all of the old rules is potentially
a needless activity when so many rules, whichever rules they are, have been
broken. There’s more to artistic
innovation than sweeping away the old.
Leonard B. Meyer’s writing suggests that many of the great artists of
earlier eras were not even innovators who devised completely new rules. Meyer, writing in the late 1980s, observed
that the century had been full of bids at developing new rules.
Where Adorno claimed the difficulty of contemporary composing was that
a composer had to develop a new musical language, Meyer surveyed the same
century and concluded that for the most part attempts at codifying new rules
had not led to a conclusive set of solutions to the problems people believed
the new rules could address. Nor, for
that matter, did it seem to be the case that great artists of the past could
even be identified as those who “broke the rules” as much as they were
strategists who figured out how to play by existing rules and norms in
inventive ways.
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 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.
Conversely, when the
stylistic constraints inherited by composers are coherent and well established,
as well as compatible with prevalent aesthetic/cultural ideals, innovation will
tend to be quite modest, taking the form of the elaboration and refinement of
existing strategies. In a broad sense, this was the situation in which J. S.
Bach and Mozart found themselves. Stylistic stability facilitates choosing
because possibilities and alternatives are clearly understood and coherently
interrelated; as a result, periods of stability are usually characterized by
high rates of productivity.
But there is another, intermediate
possibility: a situation in which the fundamental principles of a style--its
basic rules and strategies--have already been established, but significant
compositional possibilities remain to be realized. In such situations,
innovation involves the devising of new strategies and schemata. Haydn's
development of some of the possibilities latent in the dramatic principle of
sonata form were strategic innovations of this kind. here the general stylistic
situation merges with specifically compositional problems.
Every composition, even the
most conventional and routine, is an actualization of possibilities latent in
the constraints of a style.
Somewhat contra Adorno, Meyer’s position stakes out a claim that there
is no way to avoid culturally assimilated constraints and stylistic norms. Meyer proposed that a fixation in twentieth
century music theory, analysis and composition on the value of innovation had
prized innovation at the expense of considering other elements. But there is a
paradoxical conceptual overlap in what Meyer observed as a problem in
innovation as an aesthetic goal unto itself in theory, history and practice
that ties into Adorno’s criticism of serialist and aleatoric music:
page 142
Our understanding of
influence has to a considerable extent been biased by the scientific model.
That model, which emphasized the importance of the discovery of new data and
the devising of new theory, was complemented by nineteenth-century beliefs that
stressed the value of innovation (as progress). As a result, our age has
conceived of creativity almost entirely in terms of the discovery and use of
novelty. Investigators have asked, in repeated studies of little children as
well as of famous artists and scientists: How
are new ideas generated? Where do they come from? What is the role of the
unconscious? and so on. Though doubtless of great psychological interest, this
concern with causes and sources of innovation has had unfortunate consequences
for our understanding of history. For
undue emphasis on the generation of novelty has resulted in almost total
neglect of the other facet of creativity--choosing. [emphasis added] Of course, choosing is always done by some
individual. But the constraints that seem most to influence the compositional
choices which shape the course of music history are not those peculiar to the
psyche of the individual composer, but those of the prevalent musical style and
of the larger cultural community.
Richard Taruskin has described a kind of “race to the patent office”
approach to modernism and musical innovation and if his comments to that effect
come with dryly snide remarks about the New Complexity there’s something to be
said about the general complaint, something that was probably put more directly
by Meyer—emphasis on generating novelty was prized at the neglect of
considering choice. Yet, as we’ve seen,
Adorno’s criticism of serialism was that it was a technocratic approach to art
that relieved a composer of ever having to make choices. Creativity studies can still harbor what is
ultimately a technocratic ethos, prizing discovery of how we approach
creativity so that, ultimately, it is sublated into technique for its own
sake. A paradoxical insistence on
instrumental reason in the pursuit of the cultivation and creation of beauty
seems like the kind of thing Adorno was setting himself against, at least as I
read Adorno. Others may reach different
conclusions.
Meyer claimed that in the end conventions are inextricably woven into
how we think about and in the arts. Adorno
regarded the sounds of the Romantic era as spent but we might be able to
suggest that in his criticism bordering on outright condemnation of serialism
and aleatoric music Adorno was grasping that there was … I’ll just borrow a
theological term here … a kind of postmillennialist triumphalist philosophy of
history being worked out in modernist music that needed to be repudiated. Ideologies commensurate with some kind of
Manifest Destiny, so to speak, had to be rejected. But Adorno was, arguably, trapped in a “race
to the patent office” conception of musical history. He might have wanted the patent office closed
but he insisted the old styles were “spent”.
If they were spent, however, there was still nothing for it but to move
forward with the paradoxical effect that Adorno could not really ultimately
prescribe a meaningful path out of a double bind imposed on composers by his
own approach to music history.
Leonard B. Meyer put things a bit differently but partly addressed the
core conundrum of what conventions would be left if all conventions were
rejected.
pages 344-345
The repudiation of
constraints may be possible in aesthetic theory, but it is not so in
compositional practice: some means must be found for selecting sounds--or
nonsounds. ...
There is, then, an inherent incompatibility between
radical originality and individual expression because the latter depends on
deviation from shared norms for its delineation. Therefore, to the extent that
the prizing of originality leads to the abrogation of such norms, the
delineation of individual expression either becomes attenuated or requires ever
more radical departures from whatever norms are still prevalent. Thus,
especially in those styles of twentieth-century music in which constraints have
been affected by a compelling concern with originality, originality ceases to
be connected with individual expression.
[emphasis added]
The special prizing of
originality and the consequent radicalization of deviation in the twentieth
century were related to a number of facets of Romanticism. First the belief
that the arts, like other realms of culture, progressed made innovation seem
desirable--even a kind of moral/historical imperative. Conservative composers
were often looked upon as renegades. Second, the common conception of artistic
innovation as somehow analogous to scientific discovery (exemplified in the
phrase "experimental music") implied an association among categorical
novelty, creativity and value. Finally, the existence of radical novelty made
innovation itself an important basis for critical evaluation. For, as shared
constraints--rules, strategies, and other conventional norms--became less and
less important, the evaluation of relationships within compositions became
increasingly problematic. What could be judged, however, was the novelty of a
composition. As result, one of the chief concerns of criticism (for instance,
from the 1940s through the 1960s) became the identification and often the
celebration of innovation.
If the concern of criticism
was frequently with novelty, the concern of twentieth century music theory has
been with innate, natural universals to the virtual exclusion of any
consideration of the role of learned, cultural constraints in the shaping of
musical experience. ...
In other words, we were still trapped in the ideological paths laid out
during the Romantic era. It’s not
surprising that a musical style or, better yet, technique, developed in
reaction to the Romantic ideals was a kind of pastiche that explicitly flouted
the idea of originality at every conceptual level. This is not necessarily done as a matter of
parody, satire or spoofing; it’s possible that this meta-level technique that
we could call … oh … let’s just call it sampling, could play a role in
recodifying musical conventions in a way that gets around or gets out of
Adorno’s double bind that insists we reject the old worn out clichés on the one
hand while noting that composers are somehow obliged to develop musical
languages as if from whole cloth on the other.
Adorno’s faith that humans could develop enough consciousness to enjoy
Schoenberg might have put too much faith in humanity’s capacity to overcome
what others have regarded as music appreciations constrained by, well,
cognitive constraints.
page 349
... human communication is
for the most part dependent on learning. In this sense, all competence leads to
exclusiveness and, for any particular in-group, to elitism.
The answer to the question
posed earlier seems clear: it is not
in our nature to be naively natural, without cultivated concepts and
conventions. Innate cognitive capacities and predispositions can provide only a
portion of the constraints necessary for successful communication. The
remaining constraints must be provided by culture--by stylistics rules and
strategies, and by the classes and conventions, the syntax and schemata through
which rules and strategies are realized. Without cultural constraints, memory
is emasculated by the momentary; envisaging is enervated and choice crippled by
confinement to the immediate. And to preclude all but immediate choice is to
dehumanize the human animal. Human nature without cultural nature is an
impossibility, a grand delusion.
Rejecting conventions in and of itself is easy. But there may, in the end, be no art to it.
Art may involve something trickier, learning the conventions and then
manipulating those conventions themselves in the pursuit of developing and
continuing artistic traditions. For a time Adorno thought Schoenberg’s approach
could accomplish that but I am inclined to agree with Ben Johnston in saying
that Schoenberg had an inventive short-term solution to the perceived
exhaustion of Romantic era tonal resources that did not address the reality
that twelve-tone proliferated its own range of spent idioms without addressing
the possibility that the range of non-cliché materials was shrinking due to the
standardization of equal temperament, not because a broader concept of tonal
organization based on pitch hierarchy had ever truly been “exhausted”.
For all of the efforts of twentieth-century composers to formulate new
rules to replace the old ones, a grand extension of the Romantic project in
music, Meyer’s conclusion was that in the end basically little to none of those
efforts achieved what they were intended to:
pages 349-350
The overriding need of
twentieth-century composers--the need for a generally accepted set of
compositional constraints reconciling the claims of nature and nurture--has led
to a restless, almost Faustian, search. But few lasting or fundamentally new
constraints have been forthcoming. Most innovation has involved extrapolation
from principles already latent (or, at times, manifest) in nineteenth-century
practice. Schoenberg transforms motivic similarities into the permutational and
combinatorial operations of the twelve-tone system, and these, in turn,
extended to other parameters; the Impressionist valuing of sense experience is
elevated into an exclusive, almost moral, goal; and ... Stravinsky derives a
general compositional strategy from individual instances of rhythmic/metric
displacement found in folk music.
... when the egalitarian repudiation of learning
and convention leads from disguise to denial, it conflicts with the fundamental
characteristics of human nature.
page 351
Mention of aesthetic goals calls attention to a
question posed early in this book: is it possible to infer "the rules of
the game" (institutional facts) simply by attending to the "play of
the game" (brute facts)--the succession of stimuli? I think that the
answer is an unequivocal "no." There is no such thing as
understanding a work of art in its own terms. [emphasis added] Indeed, the very notion of work of art is cultural. The choices made by some compositional
community can be understood and explained only if relationships can be
discerned among the goals set by culture, the nature of human cognitive
processes, and the alternatives available given some set of stylistic
constraints.
To put this in musical terms, music is always conventional, expressed
by way of conventions, and understood by means of conventions. Music communicates on the basis of
non-musical or extra-musical conventions that may be subverted, knowingly
played with, leaned into, and radically or gently modified but these conventions
are part of any cognitive process of understanding what can be considered
music.
Half a century after Adorno’s death, we know perfectly well that we
don’t have any obligation to not use tonal musical language just because Adorno
said it was “spent”. We can also say that Adorno failed to grasp that jazz, a
musical idiom he regarded as an example of popular music; a modular musical
non-art in which schemas were too easily heard as ever-the-same with
stereotyped hot breaks and solo fills at cadential moments may not have been
art to Adorno but they provided something anyone who has played jazz, however
badly, knows is restored to musicians and composers with every break, a musical
moment in which a musician gets to make a choice. The tragicomedy of Adorno’s legacy in
relationship to jazz and his criticism of serialism and aleatory is that it was
in jazz that the possibility of musical choice was reinstated. Adorno was too committed to viewing jazz as a
popular style completely subjugated to the destructive power of capitalism to
see any ways in which jazz provided composers and improvisers with the kinds of
musical decision-making he found so absent in the serialism of Boulez or the
aleatory of Cage.
Even if we as musicians decide to not play or write jazz, we can still observe that Adorno's criticism of aleatory and serialism combined with his rejection of the legitimacy of tonality constitutes a double bind predicated on an understanding of musical history that we can completely reject.
Furthermore, as I’ve been arguing at length, if Adorno was
even right to claim that the modes of listening that were broken apart between
expressive-dynamic and rhythmical-spatial then repairing such a breach, if we
grant it exists, would need to come from reconciling the “song” and “dance”
that Adorno claimed had been developed in the emergence of sonata.
Which is why, of course, using American popular song and
dance music to establish such a reconciliation would almost have no choice but
to use ragtime. As we’ve seen ragtime was both popular song and popular dance
and Scott Joplin’s lost piano concerto can’t show us whether Joplin would have
solved the problem Adorno claimed had rendered both modes of listening
false. That piano concerto is lost,
after all. But what it could suggest to
us for contemporary composing is that by attempting to “elevate” a style of
popular song and dance music to the point where it could “work” in the piano
concerto that Joplin had, perhaps intuitively, grasped the kind of problem Adorno
wouldn’t articulate until decades after Scott Joplin’s death.
Next let’s look at some observations from Elaine Sisman on
the nature of later eighteenth century music instruction on the topic of music
composition. We get to discover that the
era that produced what’s called sonata form didn’t necessarily start students
off with sonata forms. Treatises on
composition from the later eighteenth century could have students start off
with dance forms. So to Sisman on a
dance form we’ll now turn.
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