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.
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.