I would say that taking idioms or gaining inspiration from past works does not constitute a continuum, i.e. tradition, if the intention is to put their integrity (their beauty) at the service of disintegration (ugliness). A correct term for such taking from the tradition would be vandalism.
“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”
“Great bosh.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”
This exchange in Brideshead Revisited between the precocious child, Cordelia, and the artist, Charles Ryder, came to mind as I contemplated an exchange with someone who questioned my assertion that some modern music was “great bosh”.
In an essay entitled “Tradition and Music Revival”, published on this very site on March 27, I criticized the atonal/dissonant music composed in the 20th century by “those who have sought to abandon tradition in pursuit of iconoclastic novelty”.
“Discordance and atonality have had their day,” I asserted. “Who listens to the faddish and fashionable composers who were so ‘new’ in their day and yet so old before their days had ended? Who listens to those whose works are dead because they were themselves never really alive?”
Later in the same essay, I described atonal/dissonant music as being nothing but “transience and trivia”.
Such a sweeping dismissal of the modernist musical ascendancy in the twentieth century elicited a polite and eloquent response from a reader in England. “If you will permit me,” he wrote, “I disagree with this strongly.”
As an advocate of Chesterton’s maxim that we should always be arguing in pursuit of the truth but never quarreling, I am very happy to permit my interlocutor to argue his case, irrespective of how strongly he disagrees with me. Indeed, I’m so happy that I’m going to share his argument with those who might have read my original essay.
He begins by questioning my assertion that the composers of atonal music sought to break with tradition: “It would seem to be the case, given how unusual this music sounds at first, but in fact all the composers who wrote this music, at least in the first 50-odd years of its existence, saw themselves as part of the great tradition of music going back to Bach…. Most of the great atonal composers took this extremely seriously.”
He singles our Arnold Schoenberg, who composed the first truly atonal music, as a composer who was “particularly conscious” of musical tradition: “Time and time again, he compared his music (humbly!) to that of Bach, Mozart and Wagner,” stating that his String Quartet No. 4 was his attempt to learn from Mozart, and that his Variations on a Recitative for organ was his emulation of Wagner’s quintet, from the Mastersingers of Nuremberg. “Many of the compositions of this school take the forms of older music: suites, symphonies, variations, string quartets. Then there are the countless transcriptions Schoenberg and his pupils made of the works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler, and many others, which show great love, reverence and understanding of their music.”
My interlocutor then reminded me that Schoenberg and his followers claimed that his music followed a logical progression into more chromatic and dissonant music, which they traced through key works, such as Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, Beethoven’s late string quartets, Brahms’ late works and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, all of which “represent significant developments as to how chromatic and dissonant music could be”.
“All this shows a great and deep respect and love for tradition,” my interlocutor concluded, “not to mention concern for keeping within it.” He then refers to a poem that Schoenberg wrote, which he later set to music, in which Schoenberg mocks Stravinsky and other modern composers “for pretending to be modern by composing music which appeared to be within tradition, but was in fact not!”
My interlocutor then highlighted the widespread use of dissonance “across all different traditions, whether atonal or not”, noting that even “ultra-conservative composers” in the 20th century employed dissonance, doing so “far more liberally than their 19th century predecessors would ever have done,” citing the fourth and sixth symphonies of Vaughan Williams as examples of this.
“I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this,” my interlocutor concluded. “I would like to emphasise that I am not saying this in a spirit of animosity, but with a civilised desire to exchange a different opinion to yours and engage in intellectual discussion without personal aggression.”
In reply, I thanked him for his thoughtful and thought-provoking response to my essay. I told him that I had taken the liberty of forwarding his criticisms to a highly experienced professor of musical composition who would be more able to respond to his concerns with the “fine tuning” necessary. In turning to someone who could speak with more gravitas on this topic than I could muster or of which I was capable, I was taking what might be called the “Cordelia option”. Having claimed that the use of atonality and dissonance by modernist composers was “great bosh”, I sought the opinion of a real “artist” or, in this case, a real composer, to verify my position. Having made the case for the prosecution, and having allowed my interlocutor to make the case for the defence, I would allow the professor of music composition to be the judge.
First, however, I will make a few closing remarks of my own.
As a sort of preamble to the expert’s final judgment of the case, I would say that taking idioms or gaining inspiration from past works does not constitute a continuum, i.e. tradition, if the intention is to put their integrity (their beauty) at the service of disintegration (ugliness). A correct term for such taking from the tradition would be vandalism. That which lacks goodness (evil) cannot create beauty or truth but can only deform (de-form) that which is good, true and beautiful. As it is taking something that existed prior to it, we can say that it is part of the tradition but it is tradition’s decay, not its nurturing and nourishing.
I hope to write something “definitive” on beauty for The Imaginative Conservative within the next month or so (God willing), in which these ideas will be expressed at greater length and hopefully with greater lucidity. In the interim, I will defer to the far greater musical knowledge of the good Professor who will judge the case. In doing so, I will do as T.S. Eliot did in the presence of Dante. Eliot said that he felt so inferior with respect to Dante that there was nothing he could do but point to him and be silent. Following his noble example and echoing the words of Hamlet, the rest is silence…
And now for the judge’s summing up, which I will quote verbatim:
I do not disagree with him that the earliest atonalists saw themselves as part of tradition, and Schoenberg himself composed some masterful tonal music in his youth (Gurrelieder, Verklaerte Nacht). Later modernists were the ones who saw themselves as iconoclastic in some cases. But that is the issue of how they saw themselves and of what their intentions were. I concede his comments on that to be true; however the issue of how the music itself sounds is entirely another question!
While I have known some modernist afficionados, and while there are some arguably elegant gestures to be found, it is, as a style, an acquired taste at best. At worst, it was a well-meant but failed experiment in finding another musical path with which to advance music history. This may have been founded on the mistaken and historically chauvinistic premise that music can advance or make progress like medicine or science, and as the industrial revolution was doing at that time. But music does not make progress or improve in this way.
Noble experiment in its intentions though it may have been in some ways, it is a railroad train that jumped the tracks and lost its way in the woods and could no longer see the forest for the trees. Objectively, it projects forms too chaotic and complex for the listening perceptions of the vast majority of people, so as to often sound random like noise often does, even as (ironically) it may be highly ordered on paper. Without studying the score on paper, just by listening (which is how music is primarily transmitted) Leonard Meyer likened it to trying to learn and retain nuclear physics orally, without being able to read or write it down and work out its mathematical formulas on paper — something few could do.
Then there is the whole matter of partially denying or choosing to ignore natural creation, in the form of rarely invoking the lower notes of the overtone series with their simple frequency ratios, which humans are wired to find pleasing in every culture. I think this person may have been more offended by your comments that the creators of Modernism were radical iconoclasts than by the fact that the music is displeasing to most people, which he concedes. But if you look at the philosophical foundations of, say, Marcel Duchamp’s meaningless Dadaism or at the novels of Camus, they are rather nihilistic or at least fully relativist, and this attitude was generally found among the intelligentsia, including (in my personal experience) most academics and composers of Modernist music through the whole 20th century.
Thus ends the judge’s summing up of the case.
As for the present author, who has served as prosecuting counsel in the case against musical modernism, I will rest my case and will desist from further comment. Instead, I will take the other Cordelia option, that which is offered by the other Cordelia, the largely silent heroine of King Lear.
“What can you say?” says Lear.
“Nothing,” says Cordelia.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
I will say nothing more and will return to Hamlet, letting his final words be mine. The rest is silence…
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The featured image is “Wagner conducting on the stage at Bayreuth (cover of The Etude magazine), 1924, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.