The Structure of Musical Revolutions

The title immediately recalls the book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Wikipedia summarizes the basic idea as follows:

Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the book way back in the 70s or 80s and I found it fascinating. But as time goes on I am less and less convinced of its application to science, but more and more see its potential application to aesthetics. Science is about objective reality and a paradigm shift is really nothing but seeing all the data from an entirely new angle. The only thing that might be subjective there is the angle. But aesthetics? That's a whole 'nother thing.

I think that what we see in the dislocations of music history might well be described as a "paradigm shift". For example, a famous one is the shift from the 16th century way of structuring music based on equal, independent voices in a context of smoothly flowing, consonant counterpoint to the 17th century way based on the polarity of soprano and bass lines with other voices used to fill out the harmony and the de-emphasis on counterpoint and the increased importance of dissonance. Or the shift from the 19th century romantic ideals of naturalism, richly textured harmony and orchestration to the early 20th century practices of rhythmic intensity, atonality and artificiality.

Examples? Sure, we got examples! Here is the 16th century texture with a madrigal by Morley:

And this is the 17th century texture with a piece by Caccini, one of the inventors of 17th century style:

Here is the 19th century with an overture by Brahms:

And the 20th century with a string quartet movement by Bartok:

Plainly these pieces are structured in very different ways with very different aesthetic goals and need to be listened to in different ways. In Kuhn's terms these competing paradigms are incommensurable. But in aesthetics, my brand of aesthetics at least, judgments and evaluations are always necessary if only because we have to choose what to listen to out of an immensity of music. I think it is possible to evaluate pieces within their paradigm: there are better and worse examples of 19th century music, for example. But is it possible to evaluate different paradigms? That is something that is much harder to argue for. How do you evaluate paradigms? Not by different paradigms, surely. Are there aesthetic standards that transcend any particular paradigm? I think there must be, because we can come up with great works of music from all sorts of different times and places. Deciding what makes these works 'great' might be pretty tough though, as their qualities are, yes, incommensurable.

Just another one of those mysteries of music I will say...

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Curing Musical Amnesia

In a world where pop music is all pervasive, the danger of musical amnesia is great. I grew up in an environment consisting only of traditional and popular music and wasn't seriously exposed to classical music until my late teens. What do I mean by musical amnesia? It is the specific malady, akin to cultural or historical amnesia, that occurs when you really have no sense of the music that exists outside the narrow horizons of the last few years of popular genres. You know Lady Gaga, but not J. S. Bach. You know Rihanna, including all the details of her personal life, but nothing of Beethoven.

So what do you do? You could either wail and gnash your teeth in the outer darkness, or read this blog! See, that was easy, wasn't it? The series of posts entitled "Masterpieces of Music" are a good place to start because they are a somewhat fragmentary stab at music history starting with Guillaume de Machaut, one of the first great composers and who worked in the later Middle Ages, the 14th century:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/01/masterpieces-of-music-guillaume-de.html

Next in the series is this post on the early Renaissance composer, Guillaume Dufay:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/01/masterpieces-of-music-guillaume-dufay.html

The series continues on up to the 19th century and will continue on, bit by bit, from there.

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Histories of Music

When I was a young man in my late teens and early twenties, just discovering classical music, I hungrily absorbed everything I could find about it. The main histories I read were the standard text by Donald J. Grout which is now in its 8th edition and more expensive than ever! Grout passed away and the book has acquired two new additional authors, but remains an expanded  version of what I read, oh, getting on forty years ago. The book has, therefore, influenced untold numbers of college students. Here is a telling quote from one review of the book: "Although I bought this book for my college class, I like it. It provides a lot of helpful information, and it thoroughly explains how music has progressed over time." It "explains how music has progressed over time..." Remember that phrase. As I continued to study at university, I discovered the Norton series of books on music history with Gustave Reese's large volumes on Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Written in the 40s and 50s, these are still in print. There was another series of smaller paperbacks that included a widely read history of 20th century music and some on non-Western music, but I can't seem to find them on Amazon.


All these histories of music are unreflective with regard to ideology and music history was taught in just this way. I was in graduate school doing doctoral seminars in musicology when the 'new' musicology was just starting to gain a foothold. I recall one seminar on twentieth century analysis where the professor (who had been teaching the course for probably twenty years) curtly listed the 'important' 20th century composers to make some point or another. One of the other students caught my eye and made a sweeping gesture with her hand in the air indicating a hierarchy: 1, 2, 3. Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok. She had become aware of the ideology surrounding the way the history of music was seen and taught.


I said these accounts were unreflective, but some of them, particularly in the case of 20th century music, were actually polemic. The series of books published by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft were particularly so in their tireless self-promotion, attacks on rivals, dogmatic insistence on performing rigor and outright fabrications. Another important book of this kind was René Leibowitz' Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music. I quote the whole title because it is very indicative of the underlying ideology.


And what is this or these ideologies that I have so coyly hinted at? It is the historicist one that believes that music progresses, developing newer and newer technical means and vocabularies for greater and greater precision in expression of... Well, more ideologies, of course, like heroic romantic individualism or existential despair or moral complacency! Or at its most extreme, the technical perfection of a compositional method is its own end and listeners are not even needed any more. Some call this 'patent-office modernism'.


I have had my awareness of these issues hugely expanded by reading the newest (and possibly the last of its kind) general history of music, the Oxford History of Western Music in five hefty volumes by Richard Taruskin, possibly the only musicologist and historian with a profound enough knowledge to be able to write such a book. I just finished the last volume yesterday. Yes, I strongly recommend reading it. It is stuffed full of musical examples in score and does not shy away from detailed analysis. It is not, however, a mere chronicle. Taruskin summarizes his approach in the fascinating introduction titled "The History of What?" in which he discusses his goals and methods. He does not merely survey the history; he examines and investigates causes. He looks at music's social context and mythologies. This is an extraordinary set of books (4000 pages in all) drawing on original documents and the most recent scholarship of the 'new' musicology. Which he is no slave to, by the way. I think it is safe to say that Taruskin does not simply replace one set of ideologies with another!


The ever-recurring theme is that there are and always have been two streams of music--at least since the beginnings of music writing: the literate and the oral. As soon as music notation was developed, it was possible to set down compositions, to 'write' music. Before this, all traditions were oral ones. Music was passed on directly. But from the very early Middle Ages, music became 'literate', though the oral traditions still co-existed. And a fantastic journey it has been. But it seems that now we may be moving into a post-literate age where most people and even many musicians, no longer 'read' music. In the pop and digital worlds, the reading of music no longer seems to be necessary.


The melody of this very old sixth-century chant may predate its written down version:

Nine hundred years later, Josquin wrote a mass based on it:

And five hundred years after Josquin, the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has revived this kind of music:

Yes, that notion of music progress is a rather questionable one, isn't it?

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Progressivism vs ...

A long-standing model for understanding music history is through progress: the emancipation of the dissonance, the development of new playing techniques or new musical forms. At times the pursuit of progress in music seems to become experimental, almost scientific. But there is an alternative way of seeing history and it is from Jorge Luis Borges, who suggested that artists choose their predecessors. An example of this odd-seeming notion is that after Romantic harmony, say, is developed, then you can go back to Bach and hear places where he has used 'Romantic' harmony. It isn't, of course, because it is just that our perceptions have been altered by later events.  My somewhat different idea is that, among the many things that composers are doing, one is being progressive, but the other is being conservative. No, that's not quite right... Let's call it "racinative" from "deracinate" to remove or separate from a native environment. To 'racinate' would be to return to the roots of something, to re-root rather than uproot.

It is the racinative urge, the precise opposite to the progressive urge, that compels Haydn to write fugues as the last movements of his supposedly 'progressive' string quartets op 20:

Pop artists do this all the time: it's called "back to the roots":

So, "racinative" as in, music that refers back to some past music or re-discovers some rooted aspect of music. Historians have ignored this fairly successfully, but I suspect it is an important aspect of music history. Composers are often fascinated with music history, even when they aren't looking to steal an idea. I know a young composer who worked hard to learn how to do a convincing pastiche of the style of Palestrina. Now there's something no-one is clamoring for! But it was important to him because it got him in touch with something important, deeply-rooted. This may also have something to do with Harold Bloom's theory of influence in literature. As Wikipedia says, "Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings." I don't know about misreading, but I think that composers often look back at those who came before in order to tap into some deep river of the essence of music and to escape the influence of the superficial fashions of the day. That may have been what Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were up to when they all incorporated fugal texture into many compositions. Fugue, at that point in time, was wildly out of fashion, which made it an interesting avenue to pursue. A racinative one, as opposed to a progressive one. I'm talking up using this new term because I think that the racinative impulse is not a conservative one, though it is often mistaken for such. The album Beggar's Banquet by the Rolling Stones, released in 1968, was racinative, not progressive, nor conservative. There had been so much experimenting the years previous with psychedelia, that the most radical act was to return to the old, blues roots.

Perhaps the most famous example of musical racination might be the invention of opera. No-one in Florence just before 1600 was trying to invent anything. What they were trying to do

was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation.

A classic example of racination: returning to or the attempt to rediscover the roots of something. Here is part of the very first opera that we have (this is the second one written, the first was lost):

The irony is that, in their attempt to NOT invent something new, but rather re-discover something very old, they did actually invent something entirely new: opera. Funnily enough, those trying earnestly to invent something entirely new often end up by producing something like this:

Incidently, Stravinsky noticed how well racination worked for the Florentine Camerata so he tried it himself:

Alas, I don't think you can perform the same act of racination twice...

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