(7) Liking has a great deal more to do with familiarity than you think it does, and substantial music cognition research backs this up.
My post says in two separate places that familiarity leads to liking; and this is why the question of whether I should continue to listen to the Great Fugue is a problem.
If liking is just about familiarity, then it doesn’t matter what we listen to, and music criticism, and music theory, and all of art, is bogus.
I’m very familiar with the song “My Sharona” by The Knack, because I had a housemate in college who played it frequently. I hate it. I’m also very familiar with the Green Acres theme song. I think that I hate it, yet I find it so compelling that it can get stuck in my head for an entire day—which requires some kind of greatness.
(5) I am totally baffled why you are so convinced that quality must be something that inheres to a piece of music. Quality is subjective, or at most inter-subjective, and aesthetic judgments do not contain truth value.
My post doesn’t say that. Theory 4 explicitly rejects that view. But if you strongly believe that aesthetic judgement has no truth value, even relative to your human biology and your culture, then musical training is a waste of time, and I am confused as to why you would call yourself a musicologist, since you then have no more understanding of music, and no better taste, than anyone else.
My knowledge of Alban Berg is limited. I have listened to his music for only about one hour total in my entire life, because I found it painful to listen to.
Aesthetic judgment has no truth value in the sense that if I like something, it is not meaningful for someone else to say “You are wrong to like it.” It may be meaningful for someone else to say “You think you like it, but you’re wrong, you actually don’t”—which I think captures the dynamic you’re concerned about in this post in some respects, and I think it’s quite appropriate to be concerned about that and to want to avoid getting railroaded into thinking you like something that you really don’t. But when I genuinely like something, there’s just not any sense in which there is a truth or falsity condition to my liking. It’s like our emotions—there are always factual beliefs that condition our emotions, but various emotional states may all be reasonable responses to the same set of facts, because of the personal, individual element.
This is all somewhat distinct from the sense in which some things are widely and predictably liked by a lot of people. We say that someone has good taste when their judgment is a good predictor of others’ judgment. These kinds of preference-clusters around some objects are about the closest we can get to saying that personal aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong. Nevertheless, the ultimate seat of aesthetic judgment is in the individual—i.e., the brain that experiences an aesthetic object and determines whether I like it or not is my own, with whatever states and inputs it possesses that make up the judgment—so I do say that actual aesthetic preference is neither true nor false.
I don’t think I have “better” musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything. Neither does my training in music performance and scholarship. When I perform music, I try to do it in ways that other people will like, and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong, often hilariously wrong.
Musicology as a scholarly discipline has little or nothing to do with making aesthetic judgments, although most musicologists are guided to some degree by their aesthetic judgments in choosing what they’ll work on. What distinguishes the profession is knowledge about music (its history, technique, and so on). I wrote a quick sketch of the kind of things academic musicologists do here, just a couple of days ago.
I don’t think I have “better” musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything.
If I understand what you are saying, you think that one could not be qualified to tell people that they are simply wrong to like what they like, but one could be qualified to tell them that they like what they like because they are stupid, or for similar reasons, including sometimes when those reasons are (or are due to) things either or both of you would rightfully label wrong according to each of your values.
Yes. In other words, your aesthetic preference is what you like, not what you wish you liked. I believe that what Phil Goetz is struggling with in the original post—an extremely valid struggle that I think we can all relate to—is something like a three-layered conflict between (a) what he likes, (b) what he would like to like, and (c) what he would like to like to like. (a) and (c) are negative—he does not like the Great Fugue and would not like to like to like it, but certain pressures make him feel in some respects as though (b) he would like to like it.
Your comment gives me an opportunity to clarify one other thing. Aesthetic judgments are often based in part, though I believe almost never wholly, on factual beliefs of some kind. Insofar as those might be mistaken, I think it does present a limited sense in which I might be wrong to like something, but only wrong relative to my own meta-preferences. To construct a silly example, imagine I like Wagner’s music in part because I am under the impression that he was a morally upright person. (This might sound like a bad reason for liking someone’s music, but I would argue that things like that factor into our aesthetic judgments really often.) Now, it’s unlikely that even my belief about Wagner’s moral character would cause me to like his music if I truly found it viscerally unpleasant, so I do think that a core of more purely aesthetic judgment remains in most cases—but let’s say that my positive aesthetic judgment is made wildly positive by my belief about Wagner’s moral character, or that a slightly negative (just worse than indifferent) aesthetic judgment is made slightly positive by my belief. Since Wagner was not a morally upright person, though, I think it’s fair to say that the portion of my aesthetic judgment about his music that is informed by that belief is simply wrong. However, I don’t think there are—by definition—any aesthetic judgments that rely entirely on facts.
To reply to this and your other comment at once, yes, this is one reason why I think it is so bad. A related idea is that I think that this obsession with a hypothetical ratability (however computationally intractable) of music fails to recognize that music is enormously wrapped up in culture. I’ll try to explain why I think that’s a fatal error. You and I agree that there are preference clusters around some pieces of music, but we interpret the existence of those clusters differently. To you, they suggest a kind of groping toward some as-yet-unseen aesthetic truth—what we would like if we were like we are now, only better (coherent extrapolated aesthetic preferences?). To me, they are limited in their (even hypothetical) extent by both individual difference and by cultural difference—preference clusters only crop up reliably among people who are relatively similar to one another and share a lot of cultural common ground. In my view, even if we were much, much better, smarter versions of ourselves, aesthetic judgment would continue to vary as widely as the combined variance of human cultures and the traits of individuals.
Another way of saying this is that music is a phenomenon created by so many aspects of culture and individual psychology, in such eclectic ways, that I don’t think a mathematical model of our responses to music can be very much less complex than a complete mathematical model of the human mind, biology, and culture. When I see people pursuing approaches to music who see it as much simpler than that (like the aforementioned trainwreck), it’s a dead giveaway that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
In my view, even if we were much, much better, smarter versions of ourselves, aesthetic judgment would continue to vary as widely as the combined variance of human cultures and the traits of individuals.
Even if we were much, much smarter versions of ourselves, intellectual judgment would continue to vary widely.
Granted there would be religious people, I do not think there would be creationists. Granted for the sake of argument a few people sufficiently smart are now creationists, were everyone that smart, the community of creationists might shrink until having such opinions about biology would be as isolating as analogous literalist Biblical opinions about the “four corners of the Earth”. Absent a supporting community, only seriously deluded smart people, such as might also think themselves Napoleon, would be creationists.
Your first paragraph is well-stated, and I agree with it.
I can at least expect that musical taste is like multi-level regression, where human biology is one level of regression with a lot of data, a culture is a second level, people who like a particular kind of music is a different second level, and an individual is a third level. Each additional level makes our model more precise, but provides less data.
So, even if I can’t say someone’s opinion of a musical piece is wrong, I could say it is very improbable, and give my estimate of their taste some kind of entropy penalty. With enough knowledge of their opinions, I could reject the hypothesis that they belong to a particular musical affiliation group.
More importantly, there is a human level of the regression, and it provides some information. Having tastes that differ significantly from standard human tastes—it could be a result of training, so it might be “good”; but it’s also as close to “wrong” as we may be able to get.
But, none of what I just said is useful for the problem posed in my post. I think the answer is brain scans.
There is something objectively good about particular musical intervals, e.g., the octave, the 1-3-5 chord, that has to do with the ratios of their frequencies.
Therefore there is some objective truth about musical taste.
You could use that to construct some metric of each interval, and make something like a Markov model of how that metric changes over time in different musical pieces, and see if you come up with patterns. But that still wouldn’t answer the question whether a deviation from that pattern indicates something new and good, or new and bad.
I think that you’re saying that my question has no answer.
There is something objectively good about particular musical intervals, e.g., the octave, the 1-3-5 chord, that has to do with the ratios of their frequencies.
That has very, very little directly to do with the aesthetics of musical composition, however. Its implications are rather in the area of how humans interpret musical sounds: all else being equal, we tend to think of acoustically simple intervals (“consonances”) as being “more fundamental” than acoustically (more) complex intervals (“dissonances”), so that we interpret the latter in terms of the former, rather than vice-versa.
It’s a curious phenomenon that, throughout history, people have thought (i.e. written treatises as if) the key to musical composition is identifying which “atomic” musical materials “sound good” (and then stringing them together, one presumes). But that isn’t how it works at all. Musical composition operates on a higher level of abstraction; the treatment of intervals and so forth is just mechanics, like spelling words for a novelist.
(Whatever the reason is that you don’t like the Great Fugue, it isn’t because it doesn’t contain enough consonant intervals.)
The challenge of composition is, in my opinion, first establishing what the musical language or the vocabulary of the given work is, then developing an interesting narrative using that language. In common-practice tonality, the musical language is more or less a constant; modern composers, in the absence of the assumption that they are writing in common-practice tonality, have to make it clear what the language is—that is, what tonal relationships form the structure of the piece—as well as providing a coherent direction to the piece.
In a sense, in some modern idioms, the harmonicity of an interval or a chord is pretty irrelevant, once the intervallic or or chordal relationships the composer is using to create the piece are consistent and understandable. That said, harmonicity is an important part of how we hear music, so what intervals are used will of course affect the quality of the finish quality.
This is more or less the standard “party line”, and even makes a certain amount of sense on its own terms, but I think it’s actually wrong.
More specifically, I don’t think “common-practice tonality” is actually a thing, music-theoretically. The illusion that it is results in my view from two circumstances: (1) the high cultural prestige of European art music from approximately 1700-1900 (corresponding basically to an era when it happened to be dominated by Germans); and (2) the fact that more recent art music is less accessible to casual listeners due specifically to its complexity (i.e. not any difference in “musical language”, if we take that to mean the fundamental principles of musical comprehension).
I think there is a fundamental change in how Western Art Music is composed around the start of 20th century; the removal of the tonic-dominant relationship as the fundamental relationship within musical works is responisble for that. Of course, the Second Viennese School considered themselves successors to that traidition, not revolutionaries or iconoclasts, and I would be inclined to agree, but I do think that there is significant to music written before theirs and music written afterwards. I’ll readily admit this may just be down to how I’ve been taught, and I’m not a musicologist (though I do have some familiarity with different types of analysis).
What do you mean by “party line”? Which part specifically is the party line? Whose party line is it? The party line of musicologists, or the party line of contemporary composers? I find it hard to imagine there’s a party line for composers, given the composers I know and the biographies of some of the bigger composers of the last century. I’m interested because these are mainly conclusions I’ve come to on my own.
I agree there is a certain amount of German-centrism in the term “common-practice tonality”, but that itself doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I agree contemporary music is more complex (excluding minimalism and other obvious exceptions) and that is a factor in its accessibility, but also people’s familiarity with the common-practice tonal language gives (as popular music is based on this language too) them expectations as to what music should be like; music that does not follow these conventions is difficult for them to understand.
I think there is a fundamental change in how Western Art Music is composed around the start of 20th century; the removal of the tonic-dominant relationship
Yes, this is a proposition I reject. Don’t worry, I don’t expect my claim to be obvious; explaining it would be a rather involved technical discussion. A necessary first step would be the wholesale rejection of the traditional Rameau-Riemann theory of “chord progressions” in the explanation of earlier music, in favor of the kind of approach taken by Schenker and, later, Westergaard.
What do you mean by “party line”? Which part specifically is the party line? Whose party line is it? The party line of musicologists, or the party line of contemporary composers?
All of the above; particularly those of high status.
I agree there is a certain amount of German-centrism in the term “common-practice tonality”, but that itself doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
It definitely exists—but only as a historical cluster of musical works, and not as a theoretical category. From a theoretical point of view (again, my theoretical point of view, which is separated by considerable inferential distance from the memes of traditional music theory), there is little use for a category which includes Bach and early Schoenberg and excludes middle and late Schoenberg.
I’m not sure I understand enough about your point of view to say whether I agree with it; I’d be interested in learning more! Have you written anything on this topic?
Westergaard sounds awesome; I’ll check him out if I get a chance (will probably be next summer—post-thesis).
There is something objectively good about particular musical intervals, e.g., the octave, the 1-3-5 chord, that has to do with the ratios of their frequencies. Therefore there is some objective truth about musical taste.
I’m not sure I agree here. I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
Music that is more consistently consonant is not better; all pieces composed entirely of octaves and fifths aren’t inherently better than all pieces that also have thirds (or any other less-harmonic interval you care to name). This also assumes that Western music theory is the only valid type; musical languages consisting of a non-diatonic system are not automatically inferior.
EDIT: I’d like to add that I’m inclined to think there is a degree of objective musical quality.
I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
Well, yeah. That’s the only reason that people still talk about just intonation—it’s considered a virtue that its intervals sound cleaner than equally tempered ones. Equal temperament is the standard because it allows transposition between keys, not because of some objection to how pure and clean just intervals are.
it’s considered a virtue that its intervals sound cleaner than equally tempered ones.
Another potential fix is to adjust timbres (i.e. sound spectra) so that they sound cleaner in equal temperament. See this example (MP3) from William Sethares’ work (ironically, the only 12-TET piece from his freely-available samples). Sounds kind of uncanny and off-key to me, but that could be due to being unfamiliar with alt. tunings. YMMV.
ETA: The Hammond organ also used 12-TET frequencies to generate its “harmonic partials”, so it was effectively just as “clean” in 12-TET as other instruments are in just intonation. On the other hand, many people would judge the effect as excessively “bland” and “indistinct”. But the sound spectrum of the Hammond organ was not very complex to begin with; applying the same fix to other instruments will probably give more appealing results.
This is talking about music as if it isn’t inherently based on time. If anything, a large number of consonances would make music sound much worse, because “dissonance” in many ways is simply sounds that require resolution of tension. If there is no tension, there is no resolution of tension. Dissonance is commonly believed to be the thing that actually makes music interesting.
Of course there is music that uses lots of consonance, but typically they will use some other device (rhythm, rising tones) to increase tension so they have something to resolve.
This also assumes that Western music theory is the only valid type; musical languages consisting of a non-diatonic system are not automatically inferior
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an empirical fact. Almost all music around the world uses a diatonic or pentatonic scale. The pentatonic favors such intervals even more strongly. The odds against this happening, if there were even one other equally-good possible non-harmonic scale, are astronomical. QED.
Contrary to popular belief, music doesn’t “use” theoretical constructs such as the diatonic scale; listeners use them to interpret music.
In other words, the important fact about the diatonic scale is not whether it is presented explicitly in music, but that even when it isn’t, it is still the basis for a listener’s comprehension of the pitch structure.
(Also note that the pentatonic scale is a strict subset of the diatonic scale.)
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an empirical fact. Almost all music around the world uses a diatonic or pentatonic scale. The pentatonic favors such intervals even more strongly. The odds against this happening, if there were even one other equally-good possible non-harmonic scale, are astronomical. QED.
The work presented in this comment (link to audio examples) makes a convincing case that the consonance of “diatonic” scale intervals is simply an artifact of common timbres/sound spectra (which in turn are due to the physical makeup of most musical instruments), combined with familiarity. The music presented there sounds “consonant” and “harmonious” to me in a way that most atonal music simply doesn’t.
(I am linking 4hodmt’s comment here only because it’s directly relevant and I don’t expect its author to join this subthread. Any upvotes should be directed there.)
What about music that does not use those scales? And 1-3-5 chords are not present in all pentatonic systems. By what standard do you consider this music to be objectively superior? Is it something based on harmonicity?
I’m not sure I agree here. I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
And I suspect that is the case, but haven’t had the opportunity to test it. It would be interesting to do blind tests using computer-generated versions of the same music using both scales.
This may not work. Temperment is difficult to adjust. As equal temperment is so ubiquitous nowadays, people will often hear non-equal temperments as simply out-of-tune and dislike them on that. Our ears are very much used to equal temperments.
But composition is not that only thing that music is. There is also performance and musical interpretation, and those will drastically affect your opinions on a particular composition. Computer-generated versions will probably not help your opinion of a piece...
My post says in two separate places that familiarity leads to liking; and this is why the question of whether I should continue to listen to the Great Fugue is a problem.
If liking is just about familiarity, then it doesn’t matter what we listen to, and music criticism, and music theory, and all of art, is bogus.
I’m very familiar with the song “My Sharona” by The Knack, because I had a housemate in college who played it frequently. I hate it. I’m also very familiar with the Green Acres theme song. I think that I hate it, yet I find it so compelling that it can get stuck in my head for an entire day—which requires some kind of greatness.
My post doesn’t say that. Theory 4 explicitly rejects that view. But if you strongly believe that aesthetic judgement has no truth value, even relative to your human biology and your culture, then musical training is a waste of time, and I am confused as to why you would call yourself a musicologist, since you then have no more understanding of music, and no better taste, than anyone else.
My knowledge of Alban Berg is limited. I have listened to his music for only about one hour total in my entire life, because I found it painful to listen to.
Aesthetic judgment has no truth value in the sense that if I like something, it is not meaningful for someone else to say “You are wrong to like it.” It may be meaningful for someone else to say “You think you like it, but you’re wrong, you actually don’t”—which I think captures the dynamic you’re concerned about in this post in some respects, and I think it’s quite appropriate to be concerned about that and to want to avoid getting railroaded into thinking you like something that you really don’t. But when I genuinely like something, there’s just not any sense in which there is a truth or falsity condition to my liking. It’s like our emotions—there are always factual beliefs that condition our emotions, but various emotional states may all be reasonable responses to the same set of facts, because of the personal, individual element.
This is all somewhat distinct from the sense in which some things are widely and predictably liked by a lot of people. We say that someone has good taste when their judgment is a good predictor of others’ judgment. These kinds of preference-clusters around some objects are about the closest we can get to saying that personal aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong. Nevertheless, the ultimate seat of aesthetic judgment is in the individual—i.e., the brain that experiences an aesthetic object and determines whether I like it or not is my own, with whatever states and inputs it possesses that make up the judgment—so I do say that actual aesthetic preference is neither true nor false.
I don’t think I have “better” musical taste than anyone. I like a lot of music that lots of other people like, and I also like some music that very few people like and hate a pretty great deal of music that a lot of people like. None of this qualifies me to tell other people that they are right or wrong to like anything. Neither does my training in music performance and scholarship. When I perform music, I try to do it in ways that other people will like, and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong, often hilariously wrong.
Musicology as a scholarly discipline has little or nothing to do with making aesthetic judgments, although most musicologists are guided to some degree by their aesthetic judgments in choosing what they’ll work on. What distinguishes the profession is knowledge about music (its history, technique, and so on). I wrote a quick sketch of the kind of things academic musicologists do here, just a couple of days ago.
If I understand what you are saying, you think that one could not be qualified to tell people that they are simply wrong to like what they like, but one could be qualified to tell them that they like what they like because they are stupid, or for similar reasons, including sometimes when those reasons are (or are due to) things either or both of you would rightfully label wrong according to each of your values.
Yes. In other words, your aesthetic preference is what you like, not what you wish you liked. I believe that what Phil Goetz is struggling with in the original post—an extremely valid struggle that I think we can all relate to—is something like a three-layered conflict between (a) what he likes, (b) what he would like to like, and (c) what he would like to like to like. (a) and (c) are negative—he does not like the Great Fugue and would not like to like to like it, but certain pressures make him feel in some respects as though (b) he would like to like it.
Your comment gives me an opportunity to clarify one other thing. Aesthetic judgments are often based in part, though I believe almost never wholly, on factual beliefs of some kind. Insofar as those might be mistaken, I think it does present a limited sense in which I might be wrong to like something, but only wrong relative to my own meta-preferences. To construct a silly example, imagine I like Wagner’s music in part because I am under the impression that he was a morally upright person. (This might sound like a bad reason for liking someone’s music, but I would argue that things like that factor into our aesthetic judgments really often.) Now, it’s unlikely that even my belief about Wagner’s moral character would cause me to like his music if I truly found it viscerally unpleasant, so I do think that a core of more purely aesthetic judgment remains in most cases—but let’s say that my positive aesthetic judgment is made wildly positive by my belief about Wagner’s moral character, or that a slightly negative (just worse than indifferent) aesthetic judgment is made slightly positive by my belief. Since Wagner was not a morally upright person, though, I think it’s fair to say that the portion of my aesthetic judgment about his music that is informed by that belief is simply wrong. However, I don’t think there are—by definition—any aesthetic judgments that rely entirely on facts.
There are definitely people who dislike Wagner’s music because of his anti-Semitism.
.
To reply to this and your other comment at once, yes, this is one reason why I think it is so bad. A related idea is that I think that this obsession with a hypothetical ratability (however computationally intractable) of music fails to recognize that music is enormously wrapped up in culture. I’ll try to explain why I think that’s a fatal error. You and I agree that there are preference clusters around some pieces of music, but we interpret the existence of those clusters differently. To you, they suggest a kind of groping toward some as-yet-unseen aesthetic truth—what we would like if we were like we are now, only better (coherent extrapolated aesthetic preferences?). To me, they are limited in their (even hypothetical) extent by both individual difference and by cultural difference—preference clusters only crop up reliably among people who are relatively similar to one another and share a lot of cultural common ground. In my view, even if we were much, much better, smarter versions of ourselves, aesthetic judgment would continue to vary as widely as the combined variance of human cultures and the traits of individuals.
Another way of saying this is that music is a phenomenon created by so many aspects of culture and individual psychology, in such eclectic ways, that I don’t think a mathematical model of our responses to music can be very much less complex than a complete mathematical model of the human mind, biology, and culture. When I see people pursuing approaches to music who see it as much simpler than that (like the aforementioned trainwreck), it’s a dead giveaway that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Even if we were much, much smarter versions of ourselves, intellectual judgment would continue to vary widely.
But there wouldn’t be creationists.
Yes there would. Much, much smarter != freed from cognitive biases.
Granted there would be religious people, I do not think there would be creationists. Granted for the sake of argument a few people sufficiently smart are now creationists, were everyone that smart, the community of creationists might shrink until having such opinions about biology would be as isolating as analogous literalist Biblical opinions about the “four corners of the Earth”. Absent a supporting community, only seriously deluded smart people, such as might also think themselves Napoleon, would be creationists.
Your first paragraph is well-stated, and I agree with it.
I can at least expect that musical taste is like multi-level regression, where human biology is one level of regression with a lot of data, a culture is a second level, people who like a particular kind of music is a different second level, and an individual is a third level. Each additional level makes our model more precise, but provides less data.
So, even if I can’t say someone’s opinion of a musical piece is wrong, I could say it is very improbable, and give my estimate of their taste some kind of entropy penalty. With enough knowledge of their opinions, I could reject the hypothesis that they belong to a particular musical affiliation group.
More importantly, there is a human level of the regression, and it provides some information. Having tastes that differ significantly from standard human tastes—it could be a result of training, so it might be “good”; but it’s also as close to “wrong” as we may be able to get.
But, none of what I just said is useful for the problem posed in my post. I think the answer is brain scans.
There is something objectively good about particular musical intervals, e.g., the octave, the 1-3-5 chord, that has to do with the ratios of their frequencies. Therefore there is some objective truth about musical taste. You could use that to construct some metric of each interval, and make something like a Markov model of how that metric changes over time in different musical pieces, and see if you come up with patterns. But that still wouldn’t answer the question whether a deviation from that pattern indicates something new and good, or new and bad.
I think that you’re saying that my question has no answer.
That has very, very little directly to do with the aesthetics of musical composition, however. Its implications are rather in the area of how humans interpret musical sounds: all else being equal, we tend to think of acoustically simple intervals (“consonances”) as being “more fundamental” than acoustically (more) complex intervals (“dissonances”), so that we interpret the latter in terms of the former, rather than vice-versa.
It’s a curious phenomenon that, throughout history, people have thought (i.e. written treatises as if) the key to musical composition is identifying which “atomic” musical materials “sound good” (and then stringing them together, one presumes). But that isn’t how it works at all. Musical composition operates on a higher level of abstraction; the treatment of intervals and so forth is just mechanics, like spelling words for a novelist.
(Whatever the reason is that you don’t like the Great Fugue, it isn’t because it doesn’t contain enough consonant intervals.)
The challenge of composition is, in my opinion, first establishing what the musical language or the vocabulary of the given work is, then developing an interesting narrative using that language. In common-practice tonality, the musical language is more or less a constant; modern composers, in the absence of the assumption that they are writing in common-practice tonality, have to make it clear what the language is—that is, what tonal relationships form the structure of the piece—as well as providing a coherent direction to the piece.
In a sense, in some modern idioms, the harmonicity of an interval or a chord is pretty irrelevant, once the intervallic or or chordal relationships the composer is using to create the piece are consistent and understandable. That said, harmonicity is an important part of how we hear music, so what intervals are used will of course affect the quality of the finish quality.
This is more or less the standard “party line”, and even makes a certain amount of sense on its own terms, but I think it’s actually wrong.
More specifically, I don’t think “common-practice tonality” is actually a thing, music-theoretically. The illusion that it is results in my view from two circumstances: (1) the high cultural prestige of European art music from approximately 1700-1900 (corresponding basically to an era when it happened to be dominated by Germans); and (2) the fact that more recent art music is less accessible to casual listeners due specifically to its complexity (i.e. not any difference in “musical language”, if we take that to mean the fundamental principles of musical comprehension).
I think there is a fundamental change in how Western Art Music is composed around the start of 20th century; the removal of the tonic-dominant relationship as the fundamental relationship within musical works is responisble for that. Of course, the Second Viennese School considered themselves successors to that traidition, not revolutionaries or iconoclasts, and I would be inclined to agree, but I do think that there is significant to music written before theirs and music written afterwards. I’ll readily admit this may just be down to how I’ve been taught, and I’m not a musicologist (though I do have some familiarity with different types of analysis).
What do you mean by “party line”? Which part specifically is the party line? Whose party line is it? The party line of musicologists, or the party line of contemporary composers? I find it hard to imagine there’s a party line for composers, given the composers I know and the biographies of some of the bigger composers of the last century. I’m interested because these are mainly conclusions I’ve come to on my own.
I agree there is a certain amount of German-centrism in the term “common-practice tonality”, but that itself doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I agree contemporary music is more complex (excluding minimalism and other obvious exceptions) and that is a factor in its accessibility, but also people’s familiarity with the common-practice tonal language gives (as popular music is based on this language too) them expectations as to what music should be like; music that does not follow these conventions is difficult for them to understand.
Yes, this is a proposition I reject. Don’t worry, I don’t expect my claim to be obvious; explaining it would be a rather involved technical discussion. A necessary first step would be the wholesale rejection of the traditional Rameau-Riemann theory of “chord progressions” in the explanation of earlier music, in favor of the kind of approach taken by Schenker and, later, Westergaard.
All of the above; particularly those of high status.
It definitely exists—but only as a historical cluster of musical works, and not as a theoretical category. From a theoretical point of view (again, my theoretical point of view, which is separated by considerable inferential distance from the memes of traditional music theory), there is little use for a category which includes Bach and early Schoenberg and excludes middle and late Schoenberg.
Cheers for clarifying that!
I’m not sure I understand enough about your point of view to say whether I agree with it; I’d be interested in learning more! Have you written anything on this topic?
Westergaard sounds awesome; I’ll check him out if I get a chance (will probably be next summer—post-thesis).
Look, there’s a bug in the website—it fails to switch background colors when reaching the 10th level of nested comments!
I’m not sure I agree here. I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
Music that is more consistently consonant is not better; all pieces composed entirely of octaves and fifths aren’t inherently better than all pieces that also have thirds (or any other less-harmonic interval you care to name). This also assumes that Western music theory is the only valid type; musical languages consisting of a non-diatonic system are not automatically inferior.
EDIT: I’d like to add that I’m inclined to think there is a degree of objective musical quality.
Well, yeah. That’s the only reason that people still talk about just intonation—it’s considered a virtue that its intervals sound cleaner than equally tempered ones. Equal temperament is the standard because it allows transposition between keys, not because of some objection to how pure and clean just intervals are.
Another potential fix is to adjust timbres (i.e. sound spectra) so that they sound cleaner in equal temperament. See this example (MP3) from William Sethares’ work (ironically, the only 12-TET piece from his freely-available samples). Sounds kind of uncanny and off-key to me, but that could be due to being unfamiliar with alt. tunings. YMMV.
ETA: The Hammond organ also used 12-TET frequencies to generate its “harmonic partials”, so it was effectively just as “clean” in 12-TET as other instruments are in just intonation. On the other hand, many people would judge the effect as excessively “bland” and “indistinct”. But the sound spectrum of the Hammond organ was not very complex to begin with; applying the same fix to other instruments will probably give more appealing results.
Yes, I understand that. What I’m arguing here is that a musical system with greater harmonicity is not neccessarily objectively better.
This is talking about music as if it isn’t inherently based on time. If anything, a large number of consonances would make music sound much worse, because “dissonance” in many ways is simply sounds that require resolution of tension. If there is no tension, there is no resolution of tension. Dissonance is commonly believed to be the thing that actually makes music interesting.
Of course there is music that uses lots of consonance, but typically they will use some other device (rhythm, rising tones) to increase tension so they have something to resolve.
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an empirical fact. Almost all music around the world uses a diatonic or pentatonic scale. The pentatonic favors such intervals even more strongly. The odds against this happening, if there were even one other equally-good possible non-harmonic scale, are astronomical. QED.
Contrary to popular belief, music doesn’t “use” theoretical constructs such as the diatonic scale; listeners use them to interpret music.
In other words, the important fact about the diatonic scale is not whether it is presented explicitly in music, but that even when it isn’t, it is still the basis for a listener’s comprehension of the pitch structure.
(Also note that the pentatonic scale is a strict subset of the diatonic scale.)
The work presented in this comment (link to audio examples) makes a convincing case that the consonance of “diatonic” scale intervals is simply an artifact of common timbres/sound spectra (which in turn are due to the physical makeup of most musical instruments), combined with familiarity. The music presented there sounds “consonant” and “harmonious” to me in a way that most atonal music simply doesn’t.
(I am linking 4hodmt’s comment here only because it’s directly relevant and I don’t expect its author to join this subthread. Any upvotes should be directed there.)
What about music that does not use those scales? And 1-3-5 chords are not present in all pentatonic systems. By what standard do you consider this music to be objectively superior? Is it something based on harmonicity?
And I suspect that is the case, but haven’t had the opportunity to test it. It would be interesting to do blind tests using computer-generated versions of the same music using both scales.
This may not work. Temperment is difficult to adjust. As equal temperment is so ubiquitous nowadays, people will often hear non-equal temperments as simply out-of-tune and dislike them on that. Our ears are very much used to equal temperments.
But composition is not that only thing that music is. There is also performance and musical interpretation, and those will drastically affect your opinions on a particular composition. Computer-generated versions will probably not help your opinion of a piece...
“It’s a small world after all...”