Yeah, the most complete way I could have put it would probably have been something like “Berg’s music contains structure, but not very much of the kind of structure that would make it sound like the classical tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries.” That’s the intuition I wanted to validate while pointing out that there’s no sense in which there’s “more music theory” in some kinds of music than in others.
Yes, this comes back to questions of quality. I’ve heard and read and looked at art that I thought was ruined by too much theory—typically not descriptive theory that tried to explain why things were good, but prescriptive theory that explained why doing things some other way would be better. The book “Learning from Las Vegas”, which takes Las Vegas architecture as pointing the way towards a new, enlightened postmodernist architecture (rather than as a bunch of random tacky stuff competing for attention) is an example of that kind of theory.
Well the “tacky” stuff in Las Vegas is certainly much better than modern architecture. Furthermore, having to compete for attention at least imposes some minimal constrains of quality, also sadly lacking from modern art.
Yeah, the most complete way I could have put it would probably have been something like “Berg’s music contains structure, but not very much of the kind of structure that would make it sound like the classical tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries.” That’s the intuition I wanted to validate while pointing out that there’s no sense in which there’s “more music theory” in some kinds of music than in others.
Yes, this comes back to questions of quality. I’ve heard and read and looked at art that I thought was ruined by too much theory—typically not descriptive theory that tried to explain why things were good, but prescriptive theory that explained why doing things some other way would be better. The book “Learning from Las Vegas”, which takes Las Vegas architecture as pointing the way towards a new, enlightened postmodernist architecture (rather than as a bunch of random tacky stuff competing for attention) is an example of that kind of theory.
Well the “tacky” stuff in Las Vegas is certainly much better than modern architecture. Furthermore, having to compete for attention at least imposes some minimal constrains of quality, also sadly lacking from modern art.