In contrast, there are fields where the best thing you can say is that, well, the people who already invested a huge portion of their lives in it think it sure is swell… . What should I make of those?
Presumably, it depends what drove them to invest time in it in the first place.
If someone ended up as a advanced composer because they really liked Beethoven etc. when they were young, and subsequently followed their nose, up through Schoenberg, until they finally became Milton Babbitt, that should suggest that something may be going on other than a cynical pursuit of status.
Now, whether you would want to bother following a path to appreciation of contemporary music will depend quite simply on how much enjoyment you think you can get out of music in the first place.
And it should be noted that this is somewhat hypothetical anyway, because it’s already been pointed out that non-specialists can and do enjoy advanced music.
The stigma against small groups of people experiencing large amounts of enjoyment—as opposed to large groups of people experiencing small amounts of enjoyment—ought to be abolished.
So you think in that comment, komponisto has sufficiently broken the similarities I have cited to theology as an academic field? If so, please elaborate further about how you came to this conclusion.
The main problem with theological ideas isn’t that they aren’t interesting, but that they aren’t true. But art doesn’t have truth-values; interestingness is all there is.
I didn’t say that he did that, but he clarified an argument which I think if fairly plausible. I’m not claiming he’s compelling. Certainly it could be made in some situations and its case still not hold, but its pretty significant evidence, I think, for his position. He can argue more if he wants to. FWIW, I still think that something has to be fairly wrong with the field if it can’t make a better opera just to prove that it can and to make some money, but something can be fairly wrong with a field without the field being bogus.
I like Lady McBeth of Mtsensk District, from 1934, but its not in cannon. I have heard great things about Dr. Atomic, but I haven’t seen it and don’t know much about it. Of cannon operas, I don’t know anything comparable to Figaro or to the very different Ring Cycle. There must be possibilities for operas that good and that different from anything else. Aida is probably my favorite ordinary cannon opera, but I don’t like it nearly as much as the others I just mentioned. I enjoy Phantom, which isn’t an Opera but which makes use of operatic vocals and melodrama and I generally enjoy pop music that incorporates highly trained vocalization skills.
I’m actually not all that familiar with Lady McBeth, having only heard excerpts on occasion. My impression is that it’s one of his more adventurous pieces, but in general, Shostakovich is too conservative for me (for which he can’t entirely be blamed, since conservatism was imposed by the regime he lived under).
What do you think of Wozzeck? Lulu? (These are close enough to “canon” to count as such, from the point of view of music history and criticism. Particularly Wozzeck.) (Your answer here will probably determine whether anything more modern has a hope of satisfying you.)
I’ve seen Doctor Atomic, though only once. I doubt you’ll find it comparable to Figaro or The Ring, but I could be wrong.
Sorry for the delay, didn’t have a chance earlier. I just checked out Wozzeck.
My assessment--
The positives:
Decent pure instrumentals when no-one is singing. Locally there is clear and interesting musical structure at times. Not repetitive. Definitely music.
The negatives: No characters, no conflict, no interesting music for the first two scenes, no emotional range, no large scale structure, insipid cliche propaganda themes, intentionally ugly in every respect, repetitious, extremely boring and repetitious vocals.
My net assessment is that it was written by someone who knew how to compose, or at least how to compose interesting short snippets of symphonic music and plausibly short experimental songs but who had no idea at all of how to make an opera.
Yeah, so if you don’t like Wozzeck (probably the greatest opera of the 20th century), then it pretty much follows that you would think opera died in the 20th century.
My reaction to some of your negative points:
no large scale structure
This is demonstrably false, so I’ll have to interpret is as an assertion that you didn’t perceive any large scale structure. Which is possible, if this was your first hearing and you weren’t already acquainted with this kind of music (i.e. able to perceive large-scale structure in other works of the Second Viennese School).
It seems that you did perceive structure on the level of phrases, but not on the level of acts or the whole opera. What about intermediate levels, e.g. did you perceive structure on the level of scenes?
insipid cliche propaganda themes
This is arguably true now, after works like Wozzeck, etc., but it wasn’t true at the time it was written (WWI and aftermath), and it certainly wasn’t true at the time of Büchner’s original play a century earlier.
no interesting music for the first two scenes
I can see why you might say that about the first scene, if you’re new to this kind of music, but I’m surprised you would say it about the second scene, especially given that you did find interesting music elsewhere in the work. (I assume you must have liked Marie’s lullaby in the third scene, which is everybody’s favorite part.)
intentionally ugly in every respect
As a statement about the composer’s intentions, this is most assuredly wrong. (Just as our enemies don’t perceive themselves as evil, neither do artists we don’t like typically perceive themselves as creating ugly work.) I’m pretty familiar with Berg’s life and personality, and feel very confident in asserting that “intentionally ugly” is not at all how he would have described his own music.
repetitious
This seems to contradict “not repetitive” from the “positives” list, so you might want to elaborate. You seem to be referring more to vocal passages here, but these don’t contain more repetition (probably less) than the instrumental passages.
My net assessment is that it was written by someone who knew how to compose, or at least how to compose interesting short snippets of symphonic music and plausibly short experimental songs but who had no idea at all of how to make an opera.
Your disagreement with the musical establishment (and also with me personally) is quite severe in the case of this work and its composer, and so I would predict with reasonable confidence that your opinion is susceptible to updating upon further musical exposure.
Scene-level structure: I could see that the scenes were integrated pieces, and the endings were obviously appropriate endings for the sort of material that the scenes consisted of, but it seemed to me that in most cases one could have broken the scenes into 1-2 minute segments, choosing natural break points and adding transitions. You could then have shuffled the middle segments without detracting from the scenes.
The themes were obvious in 1925, but arguably not in 1914 when the opera began and definitely not in the 19th century. OTOH, I don’t think they were handled well at all.
Some artists (I’m thinking of Celine in particular) explicitly have said that they wanted to create ugly work. For that matter, some business-people I know do see themselves as ‘bad guys’, though they probably wouldn’t say ‘evil’.
Yep, complaint was about the vocals.
The point of the discussion was to figure out whether I could believe that the musical establishment is doing the same thing that earlier classical composers were doing. My impression is agnostic and remains agnostic. I’m sure that they are doing something technically difficult, and was already sure of that, but I’m just not convinced that its something worth while. The key question is essentially one of whether Beethoven or Wagner (or Gauss or Hilbert) would consider the history of music (or math) from their day forward to be interesting (and whether Beethoven etc would consider modern academic music more or less interesting than jazz, Indian classical, Pink Floyd, etc,)
still think that something has to be fairly wrong with the field if it can’t make a better opera just to prove that it can and to make some money, but something can be fairly wrong with a field without the field being bogus.
You have forgotten Goldman’s Law (of Hollywood, but it applies to all art, and particularly to making money from art): “Nobody knows anything.”
Okay, this clarifies our dispute greatly. Let me say, then, that my position here is not based on disliking “small groups that get large amounts of enjoyment”. What distinguishes music as an academic field is this purported enjoyment plus the cultural capture—the belief, which you keep repeating, that not enjoying the elite-designated music is a failing of the listener, and academia is the one that gets to make this call.
If there were a real accomplishment here, rather than a mere agreement to applaud other members of the clique, academic-produced music should outperform in blind tests, but it does not, and this is (mistakenly) dismissed as a failing on the listeners’ part. But if you’re going to permit yourself that standard, you can call absolutely anything great, and rook society into respecting it, as I have shown with the theology comparisons.
If you can hype up me the way Joshua Bell gets hyped up for his performances, then sure, I could command big fees for apparances. But this would say very little about what I have to offer.
So this has nothing to do with a stigma against small groups that have found a way to amuse themselves. No other group gets the academic respectability in the absence of objective results that art does—except perhaps other lost academic fields. And all the answers you’ve given me could work just as well to “prove” anything good and excuse why it can’t pass any objective test.
What distinguishes music as an academic field is this purported enjoyment plus the cultural capture—the belief, which you keep repeating, that not enjoying the elite-designated music is a failing of the listener, and academia is the one that gets to make this call.
I think we need to taboo the highlighted term.
There are, in fact, cognitive/intellectual prerequisites to being able to enjoy music. This shouldn’t be surprising: chimpanzees presumably don’t get human-level enjoyment out of the Beatles, much less Beethoven. (And even if they do, mice still don’t, etc.) I doubt the infant Beethoven would have appreciated the works of his adult self. And so likewise, some humans (like my current self) are better equipped to appreciate Ferneyhough than others (like my 12-year-old-self).
It occurs to me that what this argument is really about is status. I read you as resisting the idea that the kind of abilities involved in being able to enjoy academic music are something that one should be awarded status for possessing. I think this may be because you misunderstand the nature of those abilities.
(It’s very important, by the way, to understand that we’re not talking about aesthetic evaluation, at this point. We’re talking about the ability to hear the music as music, as opposed to incoherent nonsense. Only after you can actually perceive the musical structure of a piece can you begin to talk about the extent to which that structure suits your own personal tastes. But most people who say they “don’t like” contemporary art music aren’t at that stage; what they are expressing is the fact that contemporary music sounds like nonsense to them, and they are mistaking their non-enjoyment of nonsense for aesthetic disagreement, evidently not quite realizing that the music actually sounds different to people who “get” it.)
If there were a real accomplishment here, rather than a mere agreement to applaud other members of the clique, academic-produced music should outperform in blind tests
Outperform what, in what kind of test? What test does a piece of music have to pass for you to consider it a “real accomplishment”?
Meanwhile, I have some empirical predictions for you. If any of these were able to be decisively falsified, I would be confused and would have to reevaluate my model:
The average IQ of the population of Beethoven enthusiasts should be higher than the average IQ of Beatles enthusiasts, and lower than the average IQ of Schoenberg enthusiasts.
Among professional musicians, enthusiasm for the music of Schoenberg should be positively correlated with IQ to an even greater extent than among the general population. (High-IQ should be greater evidence of Schoenberg enthusiasm conditioning on the person being a professional musician.)
People who enjoy Beethoven should perform better on aural skills tests (sight-singing and musical dictation) than people who don’t. This should be true to a lesser extent if “Beethoven” is replaced by “the Beatles”, and to a greater extent if “Beethoven” is replaced by “Schoenberg”.
Answered here. No, that humans are smarter than chimpanzees does not imply that the music you like is objectively better than other music, nor does it having the capacity to be worked at for years.
(I am given caution by having heard similar arguments from rock musicians who have fifty Frank Zappa albums. Technical complication is an emotional button for art to press, that humans have and chimps don’t, but that does not make it the highest of all possible buttons.)
that humans are smarter than chimpanzees does not imply that the music you like is objectively better than other music
I did not use the highlighted phrase in my comment. You will have to spell out an argument that what I said implies that, because I don’t see it. You’ll have to start by telling me what “objectively better” means.
And then, assuming you’re actually disagreeing with me about something specific, you’ll have to tell me why the argument I presented is wrong. Which of my predictions do you disagree with, and by how much?
There are several disparate issues that I’m going to need to tie together, and I think they represent an excellent example for how to apply the lessons from the sequences, so I’m going to save my replies on this topic for an article that more coherently presents my intuitions in context.
Tentative titles: “Truly Part of Your Values”, “Excellence in the Dojo Alone”
Now, whether you would want to bother following a path to appreciation of contemporary music will depend quite simply on how much enjoyment you think you can get out of music in the first place.
Quite simply seems simply mistaken, even if you are mentioning one important factor.
If someone ended up as a advanced composer because they really liked Beethoven etc. when they were young, and subsequently followed their nose, up through Schoenberg, until they finally became Milton Babbitt, that should suggest that something may be going on other than a cynical pursuit of status.
In my experience of this sort of thing, it’s motivated by the pursuit of a personal obsession. I’ve watched this in the rabid variety of record collector, back in the ’80s and ’90s when this sort of thing could be difficult and expensive. I’ve been that record collector. It involves turning into an obsessive crank, at a penalty to status.
Note that what you have created for all this effort (obsessive record hunting, studying twentieth century music, etc) is a subjective experience. This exists only inside your own head. Perhaps you can communicate it back out again—justify the effort by perpetuating the meme—perhaps you can only tell others that it’s possible.
As I noted, at times it feels like being really fussy over the variety of heroin you’re going to ruin your life with.
Presumably, it depends what drove them to invest time in it in the first place.
If someone ended up as a advanced composer because they really liked Beethoven etc. when they were young, and subsequently followed their nose, up through Schoenberg, until they finally became Milton Babbitt, that should suggest that something may be going on other than a cynical pursuit of status.
Now, whether you would want to bother following a path to appreciation of contemporary music will depend quite simply on how much enjoyment you think you can get out of music in the first place.
And it should be noted that this is somewhat hypothetical anyway, because it’s already been pointed out that non-specialists can and do enjoy advanced music.
The stigma against small groups of people experiencing large amounts of enjoyment—as opposed to large groups of people experiencing small amounts of enjoyment—ought to be abolished.
This is a very credible short version of the argument you are making as I understand it.
So you think in that comment, komponisto has sufficiently broken the similarities I have cited to theology as an academic field? If so, please elaborate further about how you came to this conclusion.
See this comment, where I wrote:
I didn’t say that he did that, but he clarified an argument which I think if fairly plausible. I’m not claiming he’s compelling. Certainly it could be made in some situations and its case still not hold, but its pretty significant evidence, I think, for his position. He can argue more if he wants to. FWIW, I still think that something has to be fairly wrong with the field if it can’t make a better opera just to prove that it can and to make some money, but something can be fairly wrong with a field without the field being bogus.
Out of curiosity, and for calibration: what, in your opinion, was the most recent (sufficiently) “good” opera?
This is very true, and there is plenty that is wrong with the field of music.
I like Lady McBeth of Mtsensk District, from 1934, but its not in cannon. I have heard great things about Dr. Atomic, but I haven’t seen it and don’t know much about it. Of cannon operas, I don’t know anything comparable to Figaro or to the very different Ring Cycle. There must be possibilities for operas that good and that different from anything else. Aida is probably my favorite ordinary cannon opera, but I don’t like it nearly as much as the others I just mentioned. I enjoy Phantom, which isn’t an Opera but which makes use of operatic vocals and melodrama and I generally enjoy pop music that incorporates highly trained vocalization skills.
I’m actually not all that familiar with Lady McBeth, having only heard excerpts on occasion. My impression is that it’s one of his more adventurous pieces, but in general, Shostakovich is too conservative for me (for which he can’t entirely be blamed, since conservatism was imposed by the regime he lived under).
What do you think of Wozzeck? Lulu? (These are close enough to “canon” to count as such, from the point of view of music history and criticism. Particularly Wozzeck.) (Your answer here will probably determine whether anything more modern has a hope of satisfying you.)
I’ve seen Doctor Atomic, though only once. I doubt you’ll find it comparable to Figaro or The Ring, but I could be wrong.
Sorry for the delay, didn’t have a chance earlier.
I just checked out Wozzeck.
My assessment--
The positives: Decent pure instrumentals when no-one is singing. Locally there is clear and interesting musical structure at times. Not repetitive. Definitely music.
The negatives:
No characters, no conflict, no interesting music for the first two scenes, no emotional range, no large scale structure, insipid cliche propaganda themes, intentionally ugly in every respect, repetitious, extremely boring and repetitious vocals.
My net assessment is that it was written by someone who knew how to compose, or at least how to compose interesting short snippets of symphonic music and plausibly short experimental songs but who had no idea at all of how to make an opera.
Yeah, so if you don’t like Wozzeck (probably the greatest opera of the 20th century), then it pretty much follows that you would think opera died in the 20th century.
My reaction to some of your negative points:
This is demonstrably false, so I’ll have to interpret is as an assertion that you didn’t perceive any large scale structure. Which is possible, if this was your first hearing and you weren’t already acquainted with this kind of music (i.e. able to perceive large-scale structure in other works of the Second Viennese School).
It seems that you did perceive structure on the level of phrases, but not on the level of acts or the whole opera. What about intermediate levels, e.g. did you perceive structure on the level of scenes?
This is arguably true now, after works like Wozzeck, etc., but it wasn’t true at the time it was written (WWI and aftermath), and it certainly wasn’t true at the time of Büchner’s original play a century earlier.
I can see why you might say that about the first scene, if you’re new to this kind of music, but I’m surprised you would say it about the second scene, especially given that you did find interesting music elsewhere in the work. (I assume you must have liked Marie’s lullaby in the third scene, which is everybody’s favorite part.)
As a statement about the composer’s intentions, this is most assuredly wrong. (Just as our enemies don’t perceive themselves as evil, neither do artists we don’t like typically perceive themselves as creating ugly work.) I’m pretty familiar with Berg’s life and personality, and feel very confident in asserting that “intentionally ugly” is not at all how he would have described his own music.
This seems to contradict “not repetitive” from the “positives” list, so you might want to elaborate. You seem to be referring more to vocal passages here, but these don’t contain more repetition (probably less) than the instrumental passages.
Your disagreement with the musical establishment (and also with me personally) is quite severe in the case of this work and its composer, and so I would predict with reasonable confidence that your opinion is susceptible to updating upon further musical exposure.
Scene-level structure: I could see that the scenes were integrated pieces, and the endings were obviously appropriate endings for the sort of material that the scenes consisted of, but it seemed to me that in most cases one could have broken the scenes into 1-2 minute segments, choosing natural break points and adding transitions. You could then have shuffled the middle segments without detracting from the scenes.
The themes were obvious in 1925, but arguably not in 1914 when the opera began and definitely not in the 19th century. OTOH, I don’t think they were handled well at all.
Some artists (I’m thinking of Celine in particular) explicitly have said that they wanted to create ugly work. For that matter, some business-people I know do see themselves as ‘bad guys’, though they probably wouldn’t say ‘evil’.
Yep, complaint was about the vocals.
The point of the discussion was to figure out whether I could believe that the musical establishment is doing the same thing that earlier classical composers were doing. My impression is agnostic and remains agnostic. I’m sure that they are doing something technically difficult, and was already sure of that, but I’m just not convinced that its something worth while. The key question is essentially one of whether Beethoven or Wagner (or Gauss or Hilbert) would consider the history of music (or math) from their day forward to be interesting (and whether Beethoven etc would consider modern academic music more or less interesting than jazz, Indian classical, Pink Floyd, etc,)
You have forgotten Goldman’s Law (of Hollywood, but it applies to all art, and particularly to making money from art): “Nobody knows anything.”
Also, these schools don’t teach music industry—just music appreciation and making. There are schools that are for the specific purpose of teaching music writing and performance in order to make money. (The younger teen just applied to go to that one.)
Okay, this clarifies our dispute greatly. Let me say, then, that my position here is not based on disliking “small groups that get large amounts of enjoyment”. What distinguishes music as an academic field is this purported enjoyment plus the cultural capture—the belief, which you keep repeating, that not enjoying the elite-designated music is a failing of the listener, and academia is the one that gets to make this call.
If there were a real accomplishment here, rather than a mere agreement to applaud other members of the clique, academic-produced music should outperform in blind tests, but it does not, and this is (mistakenly) dismissed as a failing on the listeners’ part. But if you’re going to permit yourself that standard, you can call absolutely anything great, and rook society into respecting it, as I have shown with the theology comparisons.
If you can hype up me the way Joshua Bell gets hyped up for his performances, then sure, I could command big fees for apparances. But this would say very little about what I have to offer.
So this has nothing to do with a stigma against small groups that have found a way to amuse themselves. No other group gets the academic respectability in the absence of objective results that art does—except perhaps other lost academic fields. And all the answers you’ve given me could work just as well to “prove” anything good and excuse why it can’t pass any objective test.
I think we need to taboo the highlighted term.
There are, in fact, cognitive/intellectual prerequisites to being able to enjoy music. This shouldn’t be surprising: chimpanzees presumably don’t get human-level enjoyment out of the Beatles, much less Beethoven. (And even if they do, mice still don’t, etc.) I doubt the infant Beethoven would have appreciated the works of his adult self. And so likewise, some humans (like my current self) are better equipped to appreciate Ferneyhough than others (like my 12-year-old-self).
It occurs to me that what this argument is really about is status. I read you as resisting the idea that the kind of abilities involved in being able to enjoy academic music are something that one should be awarded status for possessing. I think this may be because you misunderstand the nature of those abilities.
(It’s very important, by the way, to understand that we’re not talking about aesthetic evaluation, at this point. We’re talking about the ability to hear the music as music, as opposed to incoherent nonsense. Only after you can actually perceive the musical structure of a piece can you begin to talk about the extent to which that structure suits your own personal tastes. But most people who say they “don’t like” contemporary art music aren’t at that stage; what they are expressing is the fact that contemporary music sounds like nonsense to them, and they are mistaking their non-enjoyment of nonsense for aesthetic disagreement, evidently not quite realizing that the music actually sounds different to people who “get” it.)
Outperform what, in what kind of test? What test does a piece of music have to pass for you to consider it a “real accomplishment”?
Meanwhile, I have some empirical predictions for you. If any of these were able to be decisively falsified, I would be confused and would have to reevaluate my model:
The average IQ of the population of Beethoven enthusiasts should be higher than the average IQ of Beatles enthusiasts, and lower than the average IQ of Schoenberg enthusiasts.
Among professional musicians, enthusiasm for the music of Schoenberg should be positively correlated with IQ to an even greater extent than among the general population. (High-IQ should be greater evidence of Schoenberg enthusiasm conditioning on the person being a professional musician.)
People who enjoy Beethoven should perform better on aural skills tests (sight-singing and musical dictation) than people who don’t. This should be true to a lesser extent if “Beethoven” is replaced by “the Beatles”, and to a greater extent if “Beethoven” is replaced by “Schoenberg”.
Answered here. No, that humans are smarter than chimpanzees does not imply that the music you like is objectively better than other music, nor does it having the capacity to be worked at for years.
(I am given caution by having heard similar arguments from rock musicians who have fifty Frank Zappa albums. Technical complication is an emotional button for art to press, that humans have and chimps don’t, but that does not make it the highest of all possible buttons.)
I did not use the highlighted phrase in my comment. You will have to spell out an argument that what I said implies that, because I don’t see it. You’ll have to start by telling me what “objectively better” means.
And then, assuming you’re actually disagreeing with me about something specific, you’ll have to tell me why the argument I presented is wrong. Which of my predictions do you disagree with, and by how much?
Your comment makes detailed claims of inherent superiority of the fans of the music you like. Are you claiming that doesn’t constitute such a claim?
A claim that X utilizes more intellectual resources than Y does not constitute a claim that X is “objectively better” than Y, no.
There are several disparate issues that I’m going to need to tie together, and I think they represent an excellent example for how to apply the lessons from the sequences, so I’m going to save my replies on this topic for an article that more coherently presents my intuitions in context.
Tentative titles: “Truly Part of Your Values”, “Excellence in the Dojo Alone”
Quite simply seems simply mistaken, even if you are mentioning one important factor.
Yes, the pursuit of status without cynicism.
In my experience of this sort of thing, it’s motivated by the pursuit of a personal obsession. I’ve watched this in the rabid variety of record collector, back in the ’80s and ’90s when this sort of thing could be difficult and expensive. I’ve been that record collector. It involves turning into an obsessive crank, at a penalty to status.
How does it affect your enjoyment of the music?
Sometimes it feels worth it!
Note that what you have created for all this effort (obsessive record hunting, studying twentieth century music, etc) is a subjective experience. This exists only inside your own head. Perhaps you can communicate it back out again—justify the effort by perpetuating the meme—perhaps you can only tell others that it’s possible.
As I noted, at times it feels like being really fussy over the variety of heroin you’re going to ruin your life with.