They don’t “dominate the field”. They’ve achieved high cultural status while doing something that looks sort-of similar to “the field”.
As an example, I’m more familiar with the work of Jeremy Soule than I am with the work of Stravinsky. That’s not at all a statement about their relative quality as composers, just a statement that one of them makes soundtracks for video games. And while they’re very nice, I can’t help but imagine that a lot of my affection for his pieces comes from the emotional attachment to the games they were in.
But I’ve also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you’re doing, you’ve gone from creation to masturbation.
I go to art museums from time to time and am struck by the difference in captions as you move from medieval art to contemporary art: the captions for the medieval art tell you who everyone in the picture is (because you’re unlikely to recognize St. Augustine by looking at him or his symbols), but the art speaks for itself. The captions for the contemporary art have to tell you not just the symbolism but also the subject. Many of them were essentially performance art, which disgusted me pretty deeply. That may actually be a better way to put it- if your work is best understood as performance art, you should change fields.
I went to a few lectures on mathematical music theory once. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I recall learning that most of the music I can enjoy (pre-1900 Western classical, 20th century pop and rock) is, structurally, confined to a very special case among all the possible scales that a music system could be built on. Someone like Schoenberg is to all the other music I listen to, as Mars is to all the different continents of the earth.
(Aside: remember the scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where the aliens communicate in music? I saw it again recently, and it cracked me up, because it was obviously trying to sound “alien” but it really wasn’t. It sounded like the tricky part of a Leonard Bernstein piece. There’s much more “alien” music right here on this planet!)
So I think Beethoven really might have been more accessible to the listeners of his day than contemporary classical music is to us. Beethoven, at least, wrote his symphonies in the same key as an ordinary folk ditty. (Sometimes he even kept the ditty!)
I’m not sure how possible it is to adapt one’s ear so that a totally new scale sounds pleasant. I can’t listen to much classical music past Stravinsky and get any pleasure out of it. But then again, I first listened to Indian classical music in adolescence, and that has a completely different structure than Western music, and it sounded good to me instantly, no inferential distance at all.
In the early 1990s I spent rather a lot of time listening avidly to the sort of thing advertised in the small ads in the back of The Wire: where the far end of post-hardcore-punk rock music, the far end of jazz and the far end of twentieth-century classical (Schoenberg is the barest start of the good stuff) converged. Most people would call this hideous racket, and I must admit that, despite all the thought that went into it, this was an aspect I would have called a feature. Disappointment was going to a concert of modern stuff and hearing something that sounded like a film soundtrack or a soundscape rather than an assault on the senses.
This is something of what I mean when I distinguish “good” or “worthwhile” from “of no cultural impact”—the latter speaks of listenership and influence on other artists. This is difficult to quantify, but (to use the example of friends doing music degrees) an academic composer who puts their stuff on the net and blogs and tweets about it and hangs out on 4chan /mu/ will have more impact than an academic composer who has nothing available. That’s the point at which the bug of art impacts the windscreen of arts industry.
I am also deeply sceptical of the notion that art progresses in the manner of technology or science. It’s made of memes and lines of influence can certainly be traced (you can even usefully do cladistics on them) and some stuff comes after other stuff. There’s simple stuff, there’s complex stuff, there’s the simplicity on the far side of complexity (you could pick up a guitar and write a punk rock song, but you are unlikely to sling those three chords as effectively as the Sex Pistols did). But we don’t study Shakespeare or Chaucer because they’re just the precursor to the amazingly advanced stuff we do now (in the manner of Newton being first-year stuff) - we study it because it’s good in itself. No-one listens to Beethoven or Bach as a precursor to current brilliance, they listen to it because it’s good in itself. Canons are, in practice, constructed retrospectively from tastes at the time; the historiography (the history of the history) of art is itself a fruitful field of study in attempting to work out what’s going on. Everyone from Shakespeare down is just trying to write a good one this time out.
(komponisto will, I suspect, consider me a barbarian at the gates at this point.)
Edit to add: Art doesn’t progress as such because the point of art is to have an effect—on the artist and/or the listener. The aim is to press the audience’s buttons. (There is a commonplace of art pontification that states that only if the artist is the test subject can the art be of true quality.) Beethoven listed what pressed his personal buttons, komponisto finds that a good and useful description of what presses his buttons. But I would be very surprised if komponisto did not test his own compositions by listening and seeing if they pressed his buttons, rather than just checklisting an algorithm. Obviously it is possible for science to actually advance this process—there is science fiction concerning scanning brains to make superstimuli so powerful as to be fatally addictive—but the human brain seems to do remarkably well at this already, massively iteratively testing possible artistic elements to see what seems to stick.
tl;dr: the constant is pushing the buttons of yourself and/or the audience in a given time, place and culture. All else is ways to get to that.
Bonus: The most horrible music I know of is my precious collection of Whitehouse. Early industrial band, amazingly still extant. Hideous screaming music that in itself seems to offend as much as the lyrics. It’s what you play back at the neighbours when they’ve played that Robbie Williams song for the fiftieth time in a row. CDs available here.
In the early 1990s I spent rather a lot of time listening avidly to the sort of thing advertised in the small ads in the back of The Wire: where the far end of post-hardcore-punk rock music, the far end of jazz and the far end of twentieth-century classical (Schoenberg is the barest start of the good stuff) converged. Most people would call this hideous racket, and I must admit that, despite all the thought that went into it, this was an aspect I would have called a feature. Disappointment was going to a concert of modern stuff and hearing something that sounded like a film soundtrack or a soundscape rather than an assault on the senses.
For some reason, I thought of this, which I shouldn’t have liked but did anyway.
Yoko Ono gets such a bad rap. As Lester Bangs notes in the linked piece, she had quite the excellent line in really good horrible noise.
Once you get the idea that horrible noise music is supposed to sound like that, you can start sorting out what works for you and what doesn’t and when and why.
(Current kick: There’s a lot of ’80s and ’90s industrial-towards-neofolk bands who did limited-edition albums in runs of a few hundred. These became legendary due to rarity. Now we have the Internet and approximately all recorded music is readily available free, and it becomes clear why the runs were only a few hundred. I play them and they brighten my day and the teenagers, taking a break from their bad heavy metal with inept sub-Metallica solos and floppy fringes, look at me like I shat in their ears personally. Fair warms the heart. Of course, horses for courses. I am not actually recommending anyone else actually bother doing this.)
I went to a few lectures on mathematical music theory once. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I recall learning that most of the music I can enjoy (pre-1900 Western classical, 20th century pop and rock) is, structurally, confined to a very special case among all the possible scales that a music system could be built on. Someone like Schoenberg is to all the other music I listen to, as Mars is to all the different continents of the earth.
This view is mistaken. It’s not, mind you, your mistake, but that of the music theory community, which has egregiously, utterly, and persistently failed to carve musical reality at its joints. In point of fact, Schoenberg uses the same set of pitches that the composers you like do—the ones you find on a piano keyboard. And contrary to implicit music-theoretical tradition, you don’t have to pretend that those 12 pitches in the octave aren’t the same notes you’re used to, either.
In simple terms, the difference between Schoenberg and the music you like, and the reason people have trouble with the former, isn’t that Schoenberg isn’t in any key, but rather that Schoenberg changes keys so quickly and constantly that your ear has trouble keeping up and feels “confused”. A note may literally be “in a different key” from the previous note. There is much less redundancy to reinforce the “meaning” (i.e. position within a diatonic scale) of a note; you have to “catch” it immediately.
You can see how this state of affairs would have been the product of gradual evolution, something analogous to an inferential chain—with more information content being packed into music with each generation of composers.
The point is, it’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.
What music I have heard in carnatic scales I have enjoyed, which I imagine is what you’re talking about.
But comments about “these are a few special cases in all of design space!” suggest to me that that’s where the quality is, not that there are vast realms of good stuff just over the horizon, and we just haven’t looked there yet. If you buy into the idea that music is a superstimulus of vocal tone, it makes perfect sense that there would only be a few ways to make music appealing to humans though there are many possible ways to make music.
My impression is that music in general has become less oriented towards melody.
Some of what I enjoy is weirder than anything I would have expected to like. I heard Sun Ra Arkestra, and enjoyed most of it. I think the trick is to get emotionally involved with changes of timbre.
But I’ve also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you’re doing, you’ve gone from creation to masturbation.
That’s a little much—there’s plenty of art which appeals to specialist audiences (hard science fiction, for example—most people aren’t going to have much fun with Diaspora), but which is still a meaningful effort by the artist.
Some video games, too, seem to be aimed at very narrow audiences, and yet are quite impressive if you happen to be part of that audience. For example, the infamously difficult I Wanna Be The Guy is quite clever, but it definitely takes a certain kind of background and mindset to actually enjoy playing it. And there are many people who don’t appreciate even extremely popular video games; for example, my mom will never experience what makes people enjoy Halo.
But I’ve also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you’re doing, you’ve gone from creation to masturbation.
What you’ve done is go from creating art for a lay audience to creating art for a specialized audience.
I agree that the extreme form of this is creating art for the enjoyment of nobody but you (aka masturbation), but there are interim stages along the way that are meaningfully distinct.
On the other hand, I saw Artist’s shit at the Tate Modern and literally spent five minutes laughing. IT IS PERFECT AND BRILLIANT. If you want the simplicity on the far side of complexity, that’s it. (… in a can.)
But I’ve also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you’re doing, you’ve gone from creation to masturbation.
That’s an unnecessarily loaded, rhetorical way to state your point of view. So if you don’t meet a certain “laymen appreciation” quota, then you’re literally not creating anymore? That’s silly, of course.
And of course I hardly need mention the negative connotations of “masturbation”.
But the point is substantively wrong, also—or, at any rate, you’re assuming the conclusion you need to prove: that the value of art depends only on the ability of laymen (large numbers of them, presumably, since I doubt it would suffice for me to exhibit particular examples) to directly appreciate it.
My fifth-grade classmates used to make a similar argument with respect to Beethoven: since I was the only one in the class who liked his work, he was clearly a failure as a composer.
Likewise, I suspect you (and others who say things like this) are probably just insufficiently aware of the community of people who appreciate contemporary art music. It’s unfortunate that there’s currently so little intersection between that community and this one; but that community exists nonetheless.
I do listen to contemporary music. Or is that not what you had in mind? :P
And of course I hardly need mention the negative connotations of “masturbation”.
I apologize if that was too crude for you, but it seems to me an apt description (both of the situation and why outsiders feel the way they feel about it). For it to be sex it needs to include other people.
the value of art depends only on the ability of laymen (large numbers of them, presumably, since I doubt it would suffice for me to exhibit particular examples) to directly appreciate it.
Of course I would never make a statement so sweeping. Masturbation is hardly valueless; it just serves a rather different function than sex, which seems to me to be a cruder restatement of your earlier point. But the implication of such a view is that the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles, and the cultural ancestor of little-known academic composers are the writers of 16th century theological texts- very sophisticated, but they’re no Shakespeare. (I should clarify that by theological texts I mean commentaries, not foundational works like the King James Bible.) And so when we discuss “the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing” there are two things we could be talking about- making music for a particular set of instruments, or significantly contributing to the history of music.
If there is any gulf of misunderstanding between us, I think it hinges on that last bit.
Crudeness wasn’t the problem; the connotation of disapproval was.
Masturbation is hardly valueless; it just serves a rather different function than sex, which seems to me to be a cruder restatement of your earlier point. But the implication of such a view is that the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles,
That absolutely does not follow. That is not an implication of “such a view” (i.e. my view) at all.
A meta-observation about your comment: it doesn’t seem to reflect your having received new information from my previous comments at all. You’ve simply restated the position that I’m arguing against, without explaining why the things I’ve said fail to undermine that position.
For example, it should be clear by now that I don’t agree that “the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles”, and it should be equally clear why: in addition to the fact that the actual memetic lineage from Beethoven to the Beatles is much less direct than from Beethoven to contemporary art-composers (a point I didn’t actually mention explicitly), Beethoven’s intention—his profession, his métier—was to write the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music he could. (Beyond the blatant evidence of the music itself, as compared with his (more “popular”!) contemporaries, this is a matter of historical record, as revealed in his letters.) In this crucial respect, he resembles contemporary academic composers much more than the Beatles (who, as popular musicians, have few rivals, of course).
Now, I made it clear in my exchange with MichaelVassar and multifoliaterose that this was what I was talking about. Yet, in the parent comment, you continue to frame the discussion as though that had never occurred:
And so when we discuss “the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing” there are two things we could be talking about- making music for a particular set of instruments, or significantly contributing to the history of music.
...as if my idea of “the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing” had mainly to do with instrumentation, and as if we all agreed that popularity among laymen was the criterion by which “contribution to the history of music” is to be judged—in blatant disregard of my previous remarks in this thread.
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.
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. One critical question, in that case, in my opinion, is whether there are any ways in which it could be. It’s like asking if topologists or computer scientists are more genuinely ‘heirs to Euler’. At least in math we can see that Wiles was doing roughly the same thing Fermat was doing and in literature the publishing industry and public sized upon Toole, who was doing a more authentic version of what Dickens was doing. I guess that one indicative question regarding math would be “How well recognized was Wiles by his professional peers before his famous proof?”.
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.
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.
I agree. Of course interesting/advanced/sophisticated is ill-defined and perhaps irreducibly subjective.
At least in math we can see that Wiles was doing roughly the same thing Fermat was doing
For a sufficiently broad notion of “roughly” :-).
I think that it’s fair to say that Fermat’s work represents more originality (picking up on a thousand year old theme and pushing it considerably further than it previously had been in contrast with Wiles who was in some sense working within a well-defined context) whereas Wiles’ work represents a higher standard of technical virtuosity (Fermat never wrote hundred-page-long dense technical manuscripts relying on thousands of pages of background material). To what extent they would be able to interchange roles had they lived in different time periods is difficult to judge.
I guess that one indicative question regarding math would be “How well recognized was Wiles by his professional peers before his famous proof?”.
Wiles was very highly regarded before his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. His earlier papers were few but of very high quality. He was best known for his proof of the first infinite family of cases of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (with his advisor John Coates) and his proof of the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory with Barry Mazur.
It’s possible to easily indicate how the former achievement ties in with classical mathematics (c.f. the first chapter and page 92 of Neal Koblitz’s Introduction to Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms.
The latter achievement is less immediately intelligible but the methods are supposed to be close to those that Ribet used to prove his portion of the Herbrand-Ribet theorem which is a natural sharpening of the criterion which Kummer used in the mid-1800′s to prove many cases of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
(Note: Wiles’ eventual proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was along completely different conceptual lines from Kummer’s work although some of the machinery that Kummer developed is relevant.)
Of course interesting/advanced/sophisticated is ill-defined and perhaps irreducibly subjective.
It’s so convenient to be able to say that, isn’t it? A great way to save oneself the trouble of having to enter a detailed technical discussion. I think it’s a good idea to beware of such get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Yes, given anything you choose, there exists a possible mind in mind-design space that regards that thing as “interesting”. However, unless you think it’s a genuinely open question whether “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is as interesting as the Eroica, I feel that such assertions are ultimately disingenuous.
It’s so convenient to be able to say that, isn’t it? A great way to save oneself the trouble of having to enter a detailed technical discussion.
I’d like to have a more detailed discussion; my disinclination to do so up until now is a matter of short-term time constraints more than anything else.
However, unless you think it’s a genuinely open question whether “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is as interesting as the Eroica, I feel that such assertions are ultimately disingenuous.
I’m not a total aesthetic subjectivist when it comes to human music appreciation.
I do think that there are some genuinely differing aesthetic preferences between humans on account of differing genetic and environmental factors. For a simple example; I’m highly noise sensitive and this bars me from appreciating very loud music independently of how aesthetically valuable somebody who is not noise-sensitive might find it.
The question in my mind is not so much whether “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is as interesting as the Eroica as much as whether (for example) Philip Glass is as interesting as a famous academic contemporary composer. I find it quite possible that different people might have different views on this last point on account of having differing neurotypes.
I’d like to have a more detailed discussion; my disinclination to do so up until now is a matter of short-term time constraints more than anything else.
Right, but that’s the kind of thing that would enable one to evade a technical discussion (i.e. a semantic stopsign), and hence is an intellectual warning sign. (I don’t necessarily think evasion is your actual intent, of course).
I’m highly noise sensitive and this bars me from appreciating very loud music independently of how aesthetically valuable somebody who is not noise-sensitive might find it.
For the most part, at least in my opinion, the relevant musical variable is not absolute loudness measured in decibels, but relative loudness in the context of a piece. (Of course, the more degrees of loudness are used, the wider the range has to be in absolute terms.)
For example, it should be clear by now that I don’t agree that “the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles”, and it should be equally clear why: in addition to the fact that the actual memetic lineage from Beethoven to the Beatles is much less direct than from Beethoven to contemporary art-composers (a point I didn’t actually mention explicitly), Beethoven’s intention—his profession, his métier—was to write the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music he could. (Beyond the blatant evidence of the music itself, as compared with his (more “popular”!) contemporaries, this is a matter of historical record, as revealed in his letters.) In this crucial respect, he resembles contemporary academic composers much more than the Beatles (who, as popular musicians, have few rivals, of course).
I wonder if pre-WWII jazz musicians are closer in spirit to this, in terms of both “writing the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music [they] could” and “advancing the field of music”?
I wonder if pre-WWII jazz musicians are closer in spirit to this, in terms of both “writing the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music [they] could” and “advancing the field of music”?
Quite possibly. I don’t even see any need to restrict to pre-WWII. My impression is that, among the various styles of popular music, jazz has tended to come closest to manifesting this ideal in general.
As an example, I’m more familiar with the work of Jeremy Soule than I am with the work of Stravinsky. That’s not at all a statement about their relative quality as composers, just a statement that one of them makes soundtracks for video games. And while they’re very nice, I can’t help but imagine that a lot of my affection for his pieces comes from the emotional attachment to the games they were in.
But I’ve also got to point out that in aesthetic fields, when you get to the point where inferential distance makes laymen unable to appreciate what you’re doing, you’ve gone from creation to masturbation.
I go to art museums from time to time and am struck by the difference in captions as you move from medieval art to contemporary art: the captions for the medieval art tell you who everyone in the picture is (because you’re unlikely to recognize St. Augustine by looking at him or his symbols), but the art speaks for itself. The captions for the contemporary art have to tell you not just the symbolism but also the subject. Many of them were essentially performance art, which disgusted me pretty deeply. That may actually be a better way to put it- if your work is best understood as performance art, you should change fields.
I went to a few lectures on mathematical music theory once. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I recall learning that most of the music I can enjoy (pre-1900 Western classical, 20th century pop and rock) is, structurally, confined to a very special case among all the possible scales that a music system could be built on. Someone like Schoenberg is to all the other music I listen to, as Mars is to all the different continents of the earth.
(Aside: remember the scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where the aliens communicate in music? I saw it again recently, and it cracked me up, because it was obviously trying to sound “alien” but it really wasn’t. It sounded like the tricky part of a Leonard Bernstein piece. There’s much more “alien” music right here on this planet!)
So I think Beethoven really might have been more accessible to the listeners of his day than contemporary classical music is to us. Beethoven, at least, wrote his symphonies in the same key as an ordinary folk ditty. (Sometimes he even kept the ditty!)
I’m not sure how possible it is to adapt one’s ear so that a totally new scale sounds pleasant. I can’t listen to much classical music past Stravinsky and get any pleasure out of it. But then again, I first listened to Indian classical music in adolescence, and that has a completely different structure than Western music, and it sounded good to me instantly, no inferential distance at all.
In the early 1990s I spent rather a lot of time listening avidly to the sort of thing advertised in the small ads in the back of The Wire: where the far end of post-hardcore-punk rock music, the far end of jazz and the far end of twentieth-century classical (Schoenberg is the barest start of the good stuff) converged. Most people would call this hideous racket, and I must admit that, despite all the thought that went into it, this was an aspect I would have called a feature. Disappointment was going to a concert of modern stuff and hearing something that sounded like a film soundtrack or a soundscape rather than an assault on the senses.
This is something of what I mean when I distinguish “good” or “worthwhile” from “of no cultural impact”—the latter speaks of listenership and influence on other artists. This is difficult to quantify, but (to use the example of friends doing music degrees) an academic composer who puts their stuff on the net and blogs and tweets about it and hangs out on 4chan /mu/ will have more impact than an academic composer who has nothing available. That’s the point at which the bug of art impacts the windscreen of arts industry.
I am also deeply sceptical of the notion that art progresses in the manner of technology or science. It’s made of memes and lines of influence can certainly be traced (you can even usefully do cladistics on them) and some stuff comes after other stuff. There’s simple stuff, there’s complex stuff, there’s the simplicity on the far side of complexity (you could pick up a guitar and write a punk rock song, but you are unlikely to sling those three chords as effectively as the Sex Pistols did). But we don’t study Shakespeare or Chaucer because they’re just the precursor to the amazingly advanced stuff we do now (in the manner of Newton being first-year stuff) - we study it because it’s good in itself. No-one listens to Beethoven or Bach as a precursor to current brilliance, they listen to it because it’s good in itself. Canons are, in practice, constructed retrospectively from tastes at the time; the historiography (the history of the history) of art is itself a fruitful field of study in attempting to work out what’s going on. Everyone from Shakespeare down is just trying to write a good one this time out.
(komponisto will, I suspect, consider me a barbarian at the gates at this point.)
Edit to add: Art doesn’t progress as such because the point of art is to have an effect—on the artist and/or the listener. The aim is to press the audience’s buttons. (There is a commonplace of art pontification that states that only if the artist is the test subject can the art be of true quality.) Beethoven listed what pressed his personal buttons, komponisto finds that a good and useful description of what presses his buttons. But I would be very surprised if komponisto did not test his own compositions by listening and seeing if they pressed his buttons, rather than just checklisting an algorithm. Obviously it is possible for science to actually advance this process—there is science fiction concerning scanning brains to make superstimuli so powerful as to be fatally addictive—but the human brain seems to do remarkably well at this already, massively iteratively testing possible artistic elements to see what seems to stick.
tl;dr: the constant is pushing the buttons of yourself and/or the audience in a given time, place and culture. All else is ways to get to that.
Bonus: The most horrible music I know of is my precious collection of Whitehouse. Early industrial band, amazingly still extant. Hideous screaming music that in itself seems to offend as much as the lyrics. It’s what you play back at the neighbours when they’ve played that Robbie Williams song for the fiftieth time in a row. CDs available here.
For some reason, I thought of this, which I shouldn’t have liked but did anyway.
Yoko Ono gets such a bad rap. As Lester Bangs notes in the linked piece, she had quite the excellent line in really good horrible noise.
Once you get the idea that horrible noise music is supposed to sound like that, you can start sorting out what works for you and what doesn’t and when and why.
(Current kick: There’s a lot of ’80s and ’90s industrial-towards-neofolk bands who did limited-edition albums in runs of a few hundred. These became legendary due to rarity. Now we have the Internet and approximately all recorded music is readily available free, and it becomes clear why the runs were only a few hundred. I play them and they brighten my day and the teenagers, taking a break from their bad heavy metal with inept sub-Metallica solos and floppy fringes, look at me like I shat in their ears personally. Fair warms the heart. Of course, horses for courses. I am not actually recommending anyone else actually bother doing this.)
This view is mistaken. It’s not, mind you, your mistake, but that of the music theory community, which has egregiously, utterly, and persistently failed to carve musical reality at its joints. In point of fact, Schoenberg uses the same set of pitches that the composers you like do—the ones you find on a piano keyboard. And contrary to implicit music-theoretical tradition, you don’t have to pretend that those 12 pitches in the octave aren’t the same notes you’re used to, either.
In simple terms, the difference between Schoenberg and the music you like, and the reason people have trouble with the former, isn’t that Schoenberg isn’t in any key, but rather that Schoenberg changes keys so quickly and constantly that your ear has trouble keeping up and feels “confused”. A note may literally be “in a different key” from the previous note. There is much less redundancy to reinforce the “meaning” (i.e. position within a diatonic scale) of a note; you have to “catch” it immediately.
You can see how this state of affairs would have been the product of gradual evolution, something analogous to an inferential chain—with more information content being packed into music with each generation of composers.
The point is, it’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.
What music I have heard in carnatic scales I have enjoyed, which I imagine is what you’re talking about.
But comments about “these are a few special cases in all of design space!” suggest to me that that’s where the quality is, not that there are vast realms of good stuff just over the horizon, and we just haven’t looked there yet. If you buy into the idea that music is a superstimulus of vocal tone, it makes perfect sense that there would only be a few ways to make music appealing to humans though there are many possible ways to make music.
My impression is that music in general has become less oriented towards melody.
Some of what I enjoy is weirder than anything I would have expected to like. I heard Sun Ra Arkestra, and enjoyed most of it. I think the trick is to get emotionally involved with changes of timbre.
That’s a little much—there’s plenty of art which appeals to specialist audiences (hard science fiction, for example—most people aren’t going to have much fun with Diaspora), but which is still a meaningful effort by the artist.
Some video games, too, seem to be aimed at very narrow audiences, and yet are quite impressive if you happen to be part of that audience. For example, the infamously difficult I Wanna Be The Guy is quite clever, but it definitely takes a certain kind of background and mindset to actually enjoy playing it. And there are many people who don’t appreciate even extremely popular video games; for example, my mom will never experience what makes people enjoy Halo.
What you’ve done is go from creating art for a lay audience to creating art for a specialized audience.
I agree that the extreme form of this is creating art for the enjoyment of nobody but you (aka masturbation), but there are interim stages along the way that are meaningfully distinct.
On the other hand, I saw Artist’s shit at the Tate Modern and literally spent five minutes laughing. IT IS PERFECT AND BRILLIANT. If you want the simplicity on the far side of complexity, that’s it. (… in a can.)
That’s an unnecessarily loaded, rhetorical way to state your point of view. So if you don’t meet a certain “laymen appreciation” quota, then you’re literally not creating anymore? That’s silly, of course.
And of course I hardly need mention the negative connotations of “masturbation”.
But the point is substantively wrong, also—or, at any rate, you’re assuming the conclusion you need to prove: that the value of art depends only on the ability of laymen (large numbers of them, presumably, since I doubt it would suffice for me to exhibit particular examples) to directly appreciate it.
My fifth-grade classmates used to make a similar argument with respect to Beethoven: since I was the only one in the class who liked his work, he was clearly a failure as a composer.
Likewise, I suspect you (and others who say things like this) are probably just insufficiently aware of the community of people who appreciate contemporary art music. It’s unfortunate that there’s currently so little intersection between that community and this one; but that community exists nonetheless.
I do listen to contemporary music. Or is that not what you had in mind? :P
I apologize if that was too crude for you, but it seems to me an apt description (both of the situation and why outsiders feel the way they feel about it). For it to be sex it needs to include other people.
Of course I would never make a statement so sweeping. Masturbation is hardly valueless; it just serves a rather different function than sex, which seems to me to be a cruder restatement of your earlier point. But the implication of such a view is that the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles, and the cultural ancestor of little-known academic composers are the writers of 16th century theological texts- very sophisticated, but they’re no Shakespeare. (I should clarify that by theological texts I mean commentaries, not foundational works like the King James Bible.) And so when we discuss “the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing” there are two things we could be talking about- making music for a particular set of instruments, or significantly contributing to the history of music.
If there is any gulf of misunderstanding between us, I think it hinges on that last bit.
Crudeness wasn’t the problem; the connotation of disapproval was.
That absolutely does not follow. That is not an implication of “such a view” (i.e. my view) at all.
A meta-observation about your comment: it doesn’t seem to reflect your having received new information from my previous comments at all. You’ve simply restated the position that I’m arguing against, without explaining why the things I’ve said fail to undermine that position.
For example, it should be clear by now that I don’t agree that “the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles”, and it should be equally clear why: in addition to the fact that the actual memetic lineage from Beethoven to the Beatles is much less direct than from Beethoven to contemporary art-composers (a point I didn’t actually mention explicitly), Beethoven’s intention—his profession, his métier—was to write the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music he could. (Beyond the blatant evidence of the music itself, as compared with his (more “popular”!) contemporaries, this is a matter of historical record, as revealed in his letters.) In this crucial respect, he resembles contemporary academic composers much more than the Beatles (who, as popular musicians, have few rivals, of course).
Now, I made it clear in my exchange with MichaelVassar and multifoliaterose that this was what I was talking about. Yet, in the parent comment, you continue to frame the discussion as though that had never occurred:
...as if my idea of “the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing” had mainly to do with instrumentation, and as if we all agreed that popularity among laymen was the criterion by which “contribution to the history of music” is to be judged—in blatant disregard of my previous remarks in this thread.
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.
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. One critical question, in that case, in my opinion, is whether there are any ways in which it could be. It’s like asking if topologists or computer scientists are more genuinely ‘heirs to Euler’. At least in math we can see that Wiles was doing roughly the same thing Fermat was doing and in literature the publishing industry and public sized upon Toole, who was doing a more authentic version of what Dickens was doing. I guess that one indicative question regarding math would be “How well recognized was Wiles by his professional peers before his famous proof?”.
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.
I agree. Of course interesting/advanced/sophisticated is ill-defined and perhaps irreducibly subjective.
For a sufficiently broad notion of “roughly” :-).
I think that it’s fair to say that Fermat’s work represents more originality (picking up on a thousand year old theme and pushing it considerably further than it previously had been in contrast with Wiles who was in some sense working within a well-defined context) whereas Wiles’ work represents a higher standard of technical virtuosity (Fermat never wrote hundred-page-long dense technical manuscripts relying on thousands of pages of background material). To what extent they would be able to interchange roles had they lived in different time periods is difficult to judge.
Wiles was very highly regarded before his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. His earlier papers were few but of very high quality. He was best known for his proof of the first infinite family of cases of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (with his advisor John Coates) and his proof of the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory with Barry Mazur.
It’s possible to easily indicate how the former achievement ties in with classical mathematics (c.f. the first chapter and page 92 of Neal Koblitz’s Introduction to Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms.
The latter achievement is less immediately intelligible but the methods are supposed to be close to those that Ribet used to prove his portion of the Herbrand-Ribet theorem which is a natural sharpening of the criterion which Kummer used in the mid-1800′s to prove many cases of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
(Note: Wiles’ eventual proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was along completely different conceptual lines from Kummer’s work although some of the machinery that Kummer developed is relevant.)
It’s so convenient to be able to say that, isn’t it? A great way to save oneself the trouble of having to enter a detailed technical discussion. I think it’s a good idea to beware of such get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Yes, given anything you choose, there exists a possible mind in mind-design space that regards that thing as “interesting”. However, unless you think it’s a genuinely open question whether “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is as interesting as the Eroica, I feel that such assertions are ultimately disingenuous.
I’d like to have a more detailed discussion; my disinclination to do so up until now is a matter of short-term time constraints more than anything else.
I’m not a total aesthetic subjectivist when it comes to human music appreciation.
I do think that there are some genuinely differing aesthetic preferences between humans on account of differing genetic and environmental factors. For a simple example; I’m highly noise sensitive and this bars me from appreciating very loud music independently of how aesthetically valuable somebody who is not noise-sensitive might find it.
The question in my mind is not so much whether “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is as interesting as the Eroica as much as whether (for example) Philip Glass is as interesting as a famous academic contemporary composer. I find it quite possible that different people might have different views on this last point on account of having differing neurotypes.
Right, but that’s the kind of thing that would enable one to evade a technical discussion (i.e. a semantic stopsign), and hence is an intellectual warning sign. (I don’t necessarily think evasion is your actual intent, of course).
For the most part, at least in my opinion, the relevant musical variable is not absolute loudness measured in decibels, but relative loudness in the context of a piece. (Of course, the more degrees of loudness are used, the wider the range has to be in absolute terms.)
I’ll reply futher later.
I wonder if pre-WWII jazz musicians are closer in spirit to this, in terms of both “writing the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music [they] could” and “advancing the field of music”?
Quite possibly. I don’t even see any need to restrict to pre-WWII. My impression is that, among the various styles of popular music, jazz has tended to come closest to manifesting this ideal in general.