For some reason it is an area (others like it include politics and language) where a lot of people feel qualified to hold forth with little to no real grasp of what actual professional music scholars do.
If you wouldn’t mind, please educate me! I have no clue whatsoever.
Well, we do research on nearly any topic you can think of in the orbit of music’s technical elements, history, interaction with culture, and interaction with individual people. There is a slowly-eroding bias toward working on “classical” music, i.e. music of the Western European “art music” tradition, although musics from outside that tradition are (as of the last couple of decades) now entirely accepted as legitimate at least in principle, and have attracted quite a bit of scholarship since they were under-studied until recently.
A few examples of the kinds of things music scholars might do:
Examine documents in an archive in order to elucidate some episode in music history (pretty much exactly what many “regular” historians do)
Use primary-source research (often conducted by others) to spin a broader narrative about the trajectory of music history in some time or place—often bringing together historical, cultural, and technical elements
Visit some unfamiliar music-culture and document its social and technical elements—in the old days, this always meant some far-flung part of the globe, increasingly these days is done anywhere a distinctive social practice around some kind of music exists (this approach in all its incarnations is known as “ethnomusicology”)
Construct a controlled experiment to test some aspect of what is going on in people’s brains when they hear, perform, or otherwise participate in music
Examine anywhere from one to thousands of musical compositions in order to describe or analyze their features or structure. When one or a few pieces are involved, this will tend to focus on what is distinctive about the composition(s); when many are involved, it will tend to generalize about broad tendencies and similarities. The actual method of analysis varies extremely widely depending on the repertoire and the analyst’s interests and orientations.
The field has largely moved on from its 1990s-era infatuation with postmodernism and a reasonably high level of scholarly rigor is present—this is not to say that no junk gets published or that music scholarship ever does (or should) resemble an exact science.
A few things that distinguish the best professional music scholarship from crankery:
While pretty much all professional music scholars do really like at least some music, we tend to be aesthetic relativists at least enough to avoid this kind of trainwreck (it’s a website whose author suggests some metrics by which we might determine that some chord progressions, melodies, etc., simply are better than others). Music scholarship has enough robust results to be quite sure that nothing like that could possibly be the case. Like most modern linguistics scholars, our basic orientation is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is strikingly infrequently the case among cranks. (Of course, since music is nearly always in part an aesthetic object, music scholars can and do express aesthetic judgments, we just know better than to confuse them with any “absolute” notion of correctness.)
We’re very comfortable with the fact that music is a cultural product, and not metaphysically special in any way—although it is a very, very complex phenomenon and frequently harder to discuss in very concrete terms than some other kinds of cultural products seem to be.
We rely on painstakingly gathered data wherever possible.
We maintain a professional expectation that we know not only the history of music but the history of our discipline, which helps us avoid rehashing the same problems others were struggling with in past centuries. Cranks often reinvent various square wheels that were long ago either dispensed with or refined into usable ideas.
We have good peer review and few enough journals that most published work has been vetted for glaring problems and does meet certain minimum standards.
I don’t claim that these standards are met in every published piece of music scholarship, but they are what the profession aspires to and usually attains. I don’t think music scholarship is as difficult as science assuming the necessary preparation, but the fact is that the necessary preparation in terms of gaining fluency with music notation, music theory, and music history takes a long time and is a high bar to clear for most people who aren’t professionals.
I like most of your comment very much—but I visited the webpage of the trainwreck, and I agree with all of it. The claims the author is making are quite modest. I am willing to go out on a limb as far as he did, and say that 12-tone music is objectively superior to atonal music; that some combinations of notes are more useful than others; that some chord progressions are more useful than others; and that fractal structure, at least as far as having some instruments providing beats at low frequencies and others at multiples of that frequency, is often a good thing.
12-tone music is objectively superior to atonal music
I definitely don’t understand this (not the aesthetic preference, but the assertion of its objective correctness). The only plausible account I’m aware of for how some music could be objectively better than some other music is the so-called “intersubjective” account, where music possesses more intrinsic quality the more widely liked it is by large numbers of people. This still runs into the problem of what it could possibly mean to tell someone who likes some unpopular music “I acknowledge that you like this, but you are incorrect”—which I take to be a fatal flaw. But nevertheless, in the case of (let’s say) tonal versus atonal music, it must be acknowledged that tonal music has various features that make it more pleasing to most people, and this can look like objective superiority in some respects (though I myself insist that it is best described as widespread agreement on its subjective superiority).
But in the case of 12-tone versus atonal music, there isn’t even widespread agreement that one or the other is better. Most people don’t like either kind and could not distinguish them from one another by ear. Among people who understand the difference, the relative merits of the two approaches is hotly disputed and has been essentially since the advent of the 12-tone system. So there isn’t even the intersubjective reason in this case to create the appearance of a particular type of music’s being objectively superior.
Some might insist that something about the presence of some type of “mandatory” structure in 12-tone music (vaguely akin to, though very different in practice from, the structuring influence of tonality in tonal music) makes it objectively superior to atonal music even if we can’t demonstrate that people actually prefer one to the other in practice. I am quite sure that no argument of this type will hold water either, but I would need to know more of the particulars to know how to address my objections.
But nevertheless, in the case of (let’s say) tonal versus atonal music, it must be acknowledged that tonal music has various features that make it more pleasing to most people, and this can look like objective superiority in some respects (though I myself insist that it is best described as widespread agreement on its subjective superiority).
And that is objective superiority, for sufficiently high values of “most”. Because we’re only talking about humans here. Ants will not value that kind of music highly, because they can’t hear it. But we can make some claims about objective superiority when we limit ourselves to humans.
Hi Phil, that Skytopia web page doesn’t mention 12-tone music being superior. It mentions “12 notes to the octave”, and maybe that’s what you meant (tonal music—the stuff most people like).
But ’12-tone’ (with the word ‘tone’) in its strict definition is actually usually atonal.
If you wouldn’t mind, please educate me! I have no clue whatsoever.
Well, we do research on nearly any topic you can think of in the orbit of music’s technical elements, history, interaction with culture, and interaction with individual people. There is a slowly-eroding bias toward working on “classical” music, i.e. music of the Western European “art music” tradition, although musics from outside that tradition are (as of the last couple of decades) now entirely accepted as legitimate at least in principle, and have attracted quite a bit of scholarship since they were under-studied until recently.
A few examples of the kinds of things music scholars might do:
Examine documents in an archive in order to elucidate some episode in music history (pretty much exactly what many “regular” historians do)
Use primary-source research (often conducted by others) to spin a broader narrative about the trajectory of music history in some time or place—often bringing together historical, cultural, and technical elements
Visit some unfamiliar music-culture and document its social and technical elements—in the old days, this always meant some far-flung part of the globe, increasingly these days is done anywhere a distinctive social practice around some kind of music exists (this approach in all its incarnations is known as “ethnomusicology”)
Construct a controlled experiment to test some aspect of what is going on in people’s brains when they hear, perform, or otherwise participate in music
Examine anywhere from one to thousands of musical compositions in order to describe or analyze their features or structure. When one or a few pieces are involved, this will tend to focus on what is distinctive about the composition(s); when many are involved, it will tend to generalize about broad tendencies and similarities. The actual method of analysis varies extremely widely depending on the repertoire and the analyst’s interests and orientations.
The field has largely moved on from its 1990s-era infatuation with postmodernism and a reasonably high level of scholarly rigor is present—this is not to say that no junk gets published or that music scholarship ever does (or should) resemble an exact science.
A few things that distinguish the best professional music scholarship from crankery:
While pretty much all professional music scholars do really like at least some music, we tend to be aesthetic relativists at least enough to avoid this kind of trainwreck (it’s a website whose author suggests some metrics by which we might determine that some chord progressions, melodies, etc., simply are better than others). Music scholarship has enough robust results to be quite sure that nothing like that could possibly be the case. Like most modern linguistics scholars, our basic orientation is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is strikingly infrequently the case among cranks. (Of course, since music is nearly always in part an aesthetic object, music scholars can and do express aesthetic judgments, we just know better than to confuse them with any “absolute” notion of correctness.)
We’re very comfortable with the fact that music is a cultural product, and not metaphysically special in any way—although it is a very, very complex phenomenon and frequently harder to discuss in very concrete terms than some other kinds of cultural products seem to be.
We rely on painstakingly gathered data wherever possible.
We maintain a professional expectation that we know not only the history of music but the history of our discipline, which helps us avoid rehashing the same problems others were struggling with in past centuries. Cranks often reinvent various square wheels that were long ago either dispensed with or refined into usable ideas.
We have good peer review and few enough journals that most published work has been vetted for glaring problems and does meet certain minimum standards.
I don’t claim that these standards are met in every published piece of music scholarship, but they are what the profession aspires to and usually attains. I don’t think music scholarship is as difficult as science assuming the necessary preparation, but the fact is that the necessary preparation in terms of gaining fluency with music notation, music theory, and music history takes a long time and is a high bar to clear for most people who aren’t professionals.
Thanks for the informative and detailed response!
Sure, my pleasure.
I like most of your comment very much—but I visited the webpage of the trainwreck, and I agree with all of it. The claims the author is making are quite modest. I am willing to go out on a limb as far as he did, and say that 12-tone music is objectively superior to atonal music; that some combinations of notes are more useful than others; that some chord progressions are more useful than others; and that fractal structure, at least as far as having some instruments providing beats at low frequencies and others at multiples of that frequency, is often a good thing.
I definitely don’t understand this (not the aesthetic preference, but the assertion of its objective correctness). The only plausible account I’m aware of for how some music could be objectively better than some other music is the so-called “intersubjective” account, where music possesses more intrinsic quality the more widely liked it is by large numbers of people. This still runs into the problem of what it could possibly mean to tell someone who likes some unpopular music “I acknowledge that you like this, but you are incorrect”—which I take to be a fatal flaw. But nevertheless, in the case of (let’s say) tonal versus atonal music, it must be acknowledged that tonal music has various features that make it more pleasing to most people, and this can look like objective superiority in some respects (though I myself insist that it is best described as widespread agreement on its subjective superiority).
But in the case of 12-tone versus atonal music, there isn’t even widespread agreement that one or the other is better. Most people don’t like either kind and could not distinguish them from one another by ear. Among people who understand the difference, the relative merits of the two approaches is hotly disputed and has been essentially since the advent of the 12-tone system. So there isn’t even the intersubjective reason in this case to create the appearance of a particular type of music’s being objectively superior.
Some might insist that something about the presence of some type of “mandatory” structure in 12-tone music (vaguely akin to, though very different in practice from, the structuring influence of tonality in tonal music) makes it objectively superior to atonal music even if we can’t demonstrate that people actually prefer one to the other in practice. I am quite sure that no argument of this type will hold water either, but I would need to know more of the particulars to know how to address my objections.
And that is objective superiority, for sufficiently high values of “most”. Because we’re only talking about humans here. Ants will not value that kind of music highly, because they can’t hear it. But we can make some claims about objective superiority when we limit ourselves to humans.
Hi Phil, that Skytopia web page doesn’t mention 12-tone music being superior. It mentions “12 notes to the octave”, and maybe that’s what you meant (tonal music—the stuff most people like).
But ’12-tone’ (with the word ‘tone’) in its strict definition is actually usually atonal.
I’d like to add to grouchymusicologist’s comment by pointing out that, unless otherwise stipulated, 12-tone music is a subset of atonal music.