When I read The Classical Revolution 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. Instead 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 (for now) 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 but
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 or other kinds of music, 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.
POSTLUDE 9-7-2019
FORMALIZED MUSIC: THOUGHT AND MATHEMATICS IN MUSIC
IANNIS XENAKIS (PENDRAGON REVISED EDITION)
Copyright 1992 by Pendragon Press
ISBN 0-945193-24-6
PAGE 38
Before generalizing further on the essence of musical composition, we must speak of the general principle of improvisation which caused a furore among the neo-serialists, and which gives them the right, so they think, to speak of chance, of the aleatory, which they thus introduce into music. They write scores in which certain combinations of sounds may be freely chosen by the interpreter. It is evident that these composer consider the various possible circuits as equivalent. Two logical infirmities are apparent which deny them the right to speak of chance on the one hand and "composition" on the other (composition in the broad sense, that is):
1. The interpreter is a highly conditioned being, so that it is not possible to accept the thesis of uncontrolled choice, of an interpreter acting like a roullette game. The martingale betting at Monte Carlo and the procession of suicides should convince anyone of this. We shall return to this.
2. The composer commits an act of resignation when he admits several possible and equivalent circuits. In the name of a "scheme" the problem of choice is betrayed, and it is the interpreter who is promoted to the rank of composer by the composer himself. There is thus a substitution of authors.
The extremist extension of this attitude is one which uses graphical signs on a piece of paper which the interpreter reads while improvising the whole. The two infirmities mentioned above are terribly aggravated here. I would like to pose a question: If this sheet of paper is put before an interpreter who is an incomparable expert on Chopin, will the result not be modulated by the style and writing of Chopin in the same way that a performer who is immersed in this style might improvise a Chopin-like cadenza to another composer's concerto? From the point of view of the composer there is no interest.
On the contrary, two conclusions may be drawn: first, that serial composition has become so banal that it can be improvised like Chopin's, which confirms the general impression; and second, that the composer resigns his function altogether, that he has nothing to say, and that his function can be taken over by paintings or by cuneiform glyphs.
Notice that Xenakis' criticism of aleatory and of what might be called "moment" form are predicated on a criticism that, at its core, is like Adorno's--the composer who uses aleatory is passing the buck and the composer who uses moment form, for Xenakis, is set up a dice game in which the performer is the one who is really creating the finished work. Xenakis may not have been amenable to approaches in European concert music in which that kind of musical dice game was acceptable, although as music historians have pointed out, Mozart and Haydn and their generation were okay with musical dice games.
But the sticking point for Xenakis was the abdication of choice. I wonder if Xenakis would have regarded that as not really being a problem in more vernacular or popular styles, i.e. Greek popular music or jazz, in which musical schemas that invite variation are part of the musical game. There's no misconstrual as to whether it's a musical game that invites performer participation there, is there? Xenakis, if nothing else, seemed to set himself against both total serialism and Cage style aleatory as forms of non-choice. There are enough elements of chance in the stochastic processes we can observe in Xenakis' music that he wasn't declaring a free-for-all, but he was laying out ground rules for where and how pitches and rhythms would be played.
