John Bell Young wrote:

>It may be that those who have a hard time listening to dodecaphonic or
>twelve tone works, at least masterpieces of the genre, are too anxious
>to find "melodies" in some conventional sense, where such are governed
>principally by tertiary harmony and proceed, with the unaffected simplicity
>of a folk tune (although even folk tunes can be implicitly richer
>contrapuntally than some are willing to give them credit for!) from point
>A to point B.  What's at play here is rhythm, or to put it more succinctly,
>the presentation, manipulation and development of articulated rhythmic
>cells.  These imaginative systoles are no less riveting, pleasing or
>disturbing to the ear than the conventional expectations that even the
>simplest, most ordinary tune - itself a convention of functional harmony -
>sets up in the listener.

In his customarily astute manner, Mr.  Young here opens a large window
on the whole issue of why "modern" music is so widely detested, and why
"modern" composers (including not only dodecaphonic composers, but anyone
generally accused of "modernity")prove so difficult for many music lovers
to digest.  We Westerners have been conditioned for many centuries
(probably going back to the troubadours) to appreciate what he calls here
" 'melodies' in some conventional sense"; I would suggest that this is
because these melodies have always conveyed extra-musical content--in the
case of the troubadours, words of love and "courtesie." It is as though,
when listening to an instrumental piece with such melodies, we imagine the
words that might be written to them, and end up following associations to
these imagined words that arise in our own mind.  Consider, for example,
the "tunes" in a Tchaikovsky work, even a very great one like the
Pathetique:  how often would even the most musically knowledgeable among
us have to confess, if we were honest, do we drift off into responding
emotionally to something that is not even musical at all?

"Modern" composers, of course, deliberately tried to frustrate this kind
of listener response by writing music which would be "pure music," in such
a way that no one could imagine these lyrics.  But this is not a phenomenon
which began in the twentieth century.  Going back to the medieval setting,
it seems to me (although I have to admit that I am quite ignorant about the
whole subject) that plainsong is an example of "pure music" of this kind.
It was not composed, as far as I know, to provide a "setting" for the
words, which were not the individual expressions of a troubadour to his
lady love but anonymously written sacred texts, and therefore the music
does not "express" anything, in the manner of a conventional melody, but
simply provides an atmosphere for meditation.  Hence it can (albeit
briefly) regain popularity in the twentieth century among listeners to whom
the Latin words are meaningless vocalizations.  However, even in the field
of sacred music, the "pure music" tradition of plainsong was eventually
supplanted by the "song" tradition, as popular music conventions were
picked up by the composers of masses and motets.

>And let's not forget the nature of the instrumentarium of the time, where
>dynamics, at least as we think of them generically today, operated on quite
>a different level.  On a harpsichord, and even on the fortepiano, rhythm
>itself becomes a major part of the players dynamic vocabulary, though this
>approach, which gave life to rhythm by means of deft inflection, was by no
>means confined to the keyboard.

This is one reason, I think, why baroque pieces (especially Bach) are such
a large part of the guitar repertoire, since the instrument cannot produce
the great dynamic range of, say, the piano.  This may also be one reason
why many people dislike modern piano performances of baroque works; the
modern instrument often sounds "wasted" in this material, because it must
confine itself to a very narrow dynamic range; going from ppp to fff in the
Rachmaninoff manner would sound ridiculous.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]