I think that as a lay-person there is serious room for doubt regarding whether what modern academic composers are doing is as competent, judged as an attempt to create the most interesting/advanced/sophisiticated music possible, as what the Beatles were doing. It would be nice to know what Beethoven would have thought.
Consider the following, from a scholarly book on Beethoven’s compositional methods:
Music deserved such devotion in [Beethoven’s] view because it was a noble art—one that could ‘raise men to the level of the gods’. And as it had such elevating powers it had to be treated with due respect in his compositions, and used for the benefit of noble listeners rather than merely for entertaining the masses. ‘My supreme aim,’ he wrote, ‘is that my art should be welcomed by the noblest and most cultured people.’ Music for noble minds had to be rich, learned, elevated, and complex, and Beethoven’s was conspicuously more so than that of any of his contemporaries—especially during the period 1800-20, when few composers aspired to such aims...he disdained composers such as Rossini who were only able to write frivolous music and pretty tunes....
...Similarly, he regarded it as his duty to read learned musical treatises to increase his understanding of his art, and apparently he read a great number: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me.’...
-- Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process, p.20
Where do you honestly think someone with these kinds of sensibilities and priorities would tend to end up nowadays?
I’m not saying he wouldn’t appreciate the Beatles for what they are—a fabulous popular group. But the idea that he would consider their songs a more worthy successor to the Eroica symphony than the work of Boulez and Babbitt is pretty ridiculous.
Do you understand why the theological texts were brought up? The central contention in question is whether the claims of a field such as this can be trusted by outsiders
Standard heuristics apply. Check whether the most highly regarded people in a field seem to have impressive general intellects. Check whether they can send other costly signals that are intelligible to outsiders. (I’m pretty sure Milton Babbitt can write damn good fugues; Peter Westergaard has written the best book on “tonal” (17th-19th century) theory I know of.) Check whether any people you already regard as impressive are willing to associate with these folks. Etc.
Whatever you think the ultimate value of advanced music is, tests like these should at least be able to convince you that it isn’t a hoax.
I honestly think that someone with these sensibilities might think that music since WWII is a wasteland with respect to what they cared about.
I’m pretty sure that the authors of the best theological texts had impressive general intellects and associated with impressive people. They were probably frequently good public speakers too, a costly signal.
I don’t think advanced music might be an intentional hoax. (which could be OK. It always seemed to me that in Andy Warhol’s case hoax was the art). I think it, and advanced math, may not be the heirs to the unquestionably valuable traditions that they claim to be heirs to, but may instead by the emergent properties of certain institutional designs in the absence of outside constraints.
There are other possibilities too. It seems to me that modern art, in the sense of the 1860s-1950s, is basically not the intellectual heir of the old masters. Picasso etc were doing something much cooler than the old masters were, but what they were doing is better thought of as being an heir to certain tribal art-forms, especially from the pacific islands, empowered by industrial civilization, specialization, etc.
I honestly think that someone with these sensibilities might think that music since WWII is a wasteland with respect to what they cared about.
It is conceivable, I’ll admit, that such a person could have ended up like Schenker, who was as much a musical genius as the greatest composers of his day, but thought that music after 1900 was a wasteland. But note this: Schenker essentially wrote no music of his own! For all that he hoped his theories would form the basis of a “rebirth” of the tradition that (in his view) died with Brahms, he never bothered to put them into practice himself and demonstrate whatever he thought it was that the composers of his day should have been doing.
I don’t think this is a coincidence. The literal closest successor to Brahms was Max Reger, whom Schenker despised, and Schoenberg is the next step after Reger. I really don’t think it’s psychologically possible to be a composer of genius and a musical conservative at the same time. Yet, in order for a modern Beethoven to oppose contemporary music, that’s what would have to have happened: at some point in musical history, they would have had to have sided with the conservatives against the radicals. I don’t think someone capable of doing that would have been able to produce the Eroica in 1805; they would have more likely been the guy at the premiere who shouted “I’ll give another kreutzer if this thing will only stop!”.
I’m pretty sure that the authors of the best theological texts had impressive general intellects and associated with impressive people. They were probably frequently good public speakers too, a costly signal.
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.
Someone posted a list of questions for Brian Ferneyhough (and other contemporary composers) on the talk page of his Wikipedia article, and Ferneyhough actually responded. For some reason I think you might find it interesting; I suppose it may have to do with the fact that the writing style in some of his answers reminded me of your own.
Andy Warhol’s art was an example of the simplicity on the far side of complexity. Picasso was extremely skilled in representational art before he started doing his cool stuff. Schoenberg did more conventionally listenable music before he went all twelve-tone.
As I note, if it presses people’s buttons in a given cultural context then it works. That’s the bottom line.
I’m not saying he wouldn’t appreciate the Beatles for what they are—a fabulous popular group. But the idea that he would consider their songs a more worthy successor to the Eroica symphony than the work of Boulez and Babbitt is pretty ridiculous.
I took Vassar’s comment to indicate skepticism as to the value of contemporary academic composers rather than adulation of the Beatles.
To contextualize where he might be coming from:
I personally have a strong appreciation of music and have gotten very little out of most of the contemporary classical pieces that I’ve heard, e.g. at symphony performances. I know several people who have a strong love of music and who have had the same experience. As such, in absence of further data, it seems to me quite reasonable to have a prior against the notion that a given contemporary composer’s work is of aesthetic value to the typical person interested in music. Of course the issue may be a musical analog of inferential distance, but a priori that could be an issue in principle be for any unfamiliar music of sufficiently high Kolmogorov complexity independently of its aesthetic value to humans.
It’s unfair to make a confident judgment against such music without making a solid effort to attempt to bridge the hypothetical inferential distance, but I think that Michael Vassar’s statement that there’s serious room for a lay-person (who has not had the time to go through such a process) to doubt the value of such music.
The situation would be different if there was a very uniform consensus among classical music lovers that the contemporary material is best. As things stand; a whole number of explanations for divergent views as to the value of contemporary music could apply: it could be that the people who don’t appreciate it are unsophisticated and/or haven’t gone through the work that they would need to in order to appreciate it; it could be that the contemporary academic music world is engaged in a runaway signaling game which is unrelated to aesthetic value; it could be that the phenomenon is explained by neurodiversity; it could be some combination of all three.
Standard heuristics apply. Check whether the most highly regarded people in a field seem to have impressive general intellects. Check whether they can send other costly signals that are intelligible to outsiders. (I’m pretty sure Milton Babbitt can write damn good fugues; Peter Westergaard has written the best book on “tonal” (17th-19th century) theory I know of.) Check whether any people you already regard as impressive are willing to associate with these folks. Etc.
Whatever you think the ultimate value of advanced music is, tests like these should at least be able to convince you that it isn’t a hoax.
Consider the following, from a scholarly book on Beethoven’s compositional methods:
-- Barry Cooper, Beethoven and the Creative Process, p.20
Where do you honestly think someone with these kinds of sensibilities and priorities would tend to end up nowadays?
I’m not saying he wouldn’t appreciate the Beatles for what they are—a fabulous popular group. But the idea that he would consider their songs a more worthy successor to the Eroica symphony than the work of Boulez and Babbitt is pretty ridiculous.
Standard heuristics apply. Check whether the most highly regarded people in a field seem to have impressive general intellects. Check whether they can send other costly signals that are intelligible to outsiders. (I’m pretty sure Milton Babbitt can write damn good fugues; Peter Westergaard has written the best book on “tonal” (17th-19th century) theory I know of.) Check whether any people you already regard as impressive are willing to associate with these folks. Etc.
Whatever you think the ultimate value of advanced music is, tests like these should at least be able to convince you that it isn’t a hoax.
I honestly think that someone with these sensibilities might think that music since WWII is a wasteland with respect to what they cared about.
I’m pretty sure that the authors of the best theological texts had impressive general intellects and associated with impressive people. They were probably frequently good public speakers too, a costly signal.
I don’t think advanced music might be an intentional hoax. (which could be OK. It always seemed to me that in Andy Warhol’s case hoax was the art). I think it, and advanced math, may not be the heirs to the unquestionably valuable traditions that they claim to be heirs to, but may instead by the emergent properties of certain institutional designs in the absence of outside constraints.
There are other possibilities too. It seems to me that modern art, in the sense of the 1860s-1950s, is basically not the intellectual heir of the old masters. Picasso etc were doing something much cooler than the old masters were, but what they were doing is better thought of as being an heir to certain tribal art-forms, especially from the pacific islands, empowered by industrial civilization, specialization, etc.
It is conceivable, I’ll admit, that such a person could have ended up like Schenker, who was as much a musical genius as the greatest composers of his day, but thought that music after 1900 was a wasteland. But note this: Schenker essentially wrote no music of his own! For all that he hoped his theories would form the basis of a “rebirth” of the tradition that (in his view) died with Brahms, he never bothered to put them into practice himself and demonstrate whatever he thought it was that the composers of his day should have been doing.
I don’t think this is a coincidence. The literal closest successor to Brahms was Max Reger, whom Schenker despised, and Schoenberg is the next step after Reger. I really don’t think it’s psychologically possible to be a composer of genius and a musical conservative at the same time. Yet, in order for a modern Beethoven to oppose contemporary music, that’s what would have to have happened: at some point in musical history, they would have had to have sided with the conservatives against the radicals. I don’t think someone capable of doing that would have been able to produce the Eroica in 1805; they would have more likely been the guy at the premiere who shouted “I’ll give another kreutzer if this thing will only stop!”.
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.
Someone posted a list of questions for Brian Ferneyhough (and other contemporary composers) on the talk page of his Wikipedia article, and Ferneyhough actually responded. For some reason I think you might find it interesting; I suppose it may have to do with the fact that the writing style in some of his answers reminded me of your own.
Andy Warhol’s art was an example of the simplicity on the far side of complexity. Picasso was extremely skilled in representational art before he started doing his cool stuff. Schoenberg did more conventionally listenable music before he went all twelve-tone.
As I note, if it presses people’s buttons in a given cultural context then it works. That’s the bottom line.
(Yes, just about everything is art.)
I took Vassar’s comment to indicate skepticism as to the value of contemporary academic composers rather than adulation of the Beatles.
To contextualize where he might be coming from:
I personally have a strong appreciation of music and have gotten very little out of most of the contemporary classical pieces that I’ve heard, e.g. at symphony performances. I know several people who have a strong love of music and who have had the same experience. As such, in absence of further data, it seems to me quite reasonable to have a prior against the notion that a given contemporary composer’s work is of aesthetic value to the typical person interested in music. Of course the issue may be a musical analog of inferential distance, but a priori that could be an issue in principle be for any unfamiliar music of sufficiently high Kolmogorov complexity independently of its aesthetic value to humans.
It’s unfair to make a confident judgment against such music without making a solid effort to attempt to bridge the hypothetical inferential distance, but I think that Michael Vassar’s statement that there’s serious room for a lay-person (who has not had the time to go through such a process) to doubt the value of such music.
The situation would be different if there was a very uniform consensus among classical music lovers that the contemporary material is best. As things stand; a whole number of explanations for divergent views as to the value of contemporary music could apply: it could be that the people who don’t appreciate it are unsophisticated and/or haven’t gone through the work that they would need to in order to appreciate it; it could be that the contemporary academic music world is engaged in a runaway signaling game which is unrelated to aesthetic value; it could be that the phenomenon is explained by neurodiversity; it could be some combination of all three.
This sounds quite reasonable.