What the experiment shows is actually quite little - it doesn't pin
down whether the monkeys "liked or disliked" - merely recognised or did
not recognise.  It also did not show whether their ability is learned or
inherited.  Cats have to learn how to meow, and birds learn songs, so it
is hazardous to guess without evidence what is and what isn't "learned"
behavior.

These things being said, it is fairly clear that tonality takes advantage
of certain basic parsing habits of human beings - but then, most musical
systems do.  Some do to a greater degree than tonality, others less.  These
relationships are interesting, and have practical use, but aren't quality
judgements.  That 12 tone music was more difficult was considered by
Schoenberg as a virtue of the music - he stated that composers were making
more difficult music for the most demanding of music lovers.

Consider one part of the system of tonal practice which is clearly *not*
natural.  Namely fixed intonation.  Human singers will tune to each other
dynamically, intervals will move towards perfect fifths and octaves, even
when our tuning system does not provide clear fifths.  Hence an extended a
capella section with the instruments reentering is quite difficult - by the
end of the instruemental section the musicians will be quite out of equal
temperment.

In the end art must exist at a complex relationship to the underlying
mechanics of thought and perception.  Tonal practice was one of the most
successful system for putting various perceptual mechanisms at tension with
each other, and using these tensions to create a medium for expression and
impression.  Musical perception is natural, artistic expression is natural,
but any particular system must be one possibility out of all of the natural
ones.

What 12 tone and serial music are examples of is taking a materials
which are not rooted in perceptual necessity, but in technical necessity.
While there were philosophiocal and historical reasons for the modern
period being intensly interested in this sort of artistic system, it was
by no means the first time in artistic history that this was the case, nor
is it the last.

Consider some examples from the past - namely artistic systems based on
calligraphic design.

Letters are not natural.  Period.  Writing is an invention, and training
people to read is process of enculturation.  Writing takes advantage of
basic perceptual mechanics - but it is an artifact.  Several times in the
history of art letters have been taken as basic units of artistic design -
in the Caliphate period of islam, through out the mandrinate of China,
during the court eras in Japan, in medieval Christian writing.  Calligraphy
is universally recognised as being an artistic expression, and even among
the most conservative of art lovers - a thing of beauty.  Indeed the name
is transliterated from the *koine* "beautiful writing".

Where the failure of avant-garde modernism lies is in the concert hall
and the attitude of performance practice.  All musical systems require two
parts - underlying structural tensions, and a performance practice which
brings these tensions to life in particular form.  Consider Shakespeare's
poetry.  Consider the thought of a computer rattling off this poetry
mechanically.  It sounds terrible, it is terrible.  Consider Beethoven
churned out by sequencer.  It sounds terrible, it is terrible.  What,
until very recently, never seemed to twig with many of the most aggressive
supporters of avant-garde music was that making the music sound ugly, while
it had a certain cachet, and provided fodder for smug glowering at the
"stupid conservative audience" was a disservice to the music, a kind of
artistic cowardice not wanting to put the music forward on the same terms
and with the same complexity of incarnation as traditional music.  It was
a kind of not trying for fear of failure.  Happily this is finally
changing.

Consider, if you will, late Boulez versus early Boulez as a conductor,
and compare his recent performances of Webern with the earlier ones.
Or even the performances of his own music.  Before there was an almost
terror of allowing sensuousness into the picture, an aggressive desire for
abrasiveness, and as a result - music which sounded abrassive.  The key to
a work becoming a staple is two fold: there must be people willing to go
out of their way to hear it, and most of the rest should not be willing to
go out of their way to avoid it.  For a long time people walking out was
a mark of honour - now there is a slowly growing realisation, even among
supporters of avant-garde music, that it is no more than being boorish at
a party, a mark of bad manners.

- - -

But again the future beckons, I realise that I am aware of these issues
because my own music exists in a form which I regard as being equally
unacceptable.  The mechanical, unnuanced unartistic - almost anti-musical
- renderings that my sequencer and synthesizer produce of my music seem to
be to be unhappy necssity, as far from the realisation as the two piano
performances of Bruckner's works that were put forward in the last century,
the trio transcription of Beethoven's second symphony - and so on.

But the cause of this neessity must be dropped in the lap of the supporters
of a new music.  In my case it is a persistent inability in getting scoring
programs to produce readable versions of a score.  Each attempt produces a
festival of slurs and hand penned in notations.  It is not that the music
is, itself, that difficult to listen to, merely that, as a resident of an
old tradition, it violates norms of notation without violating the deeper
artistic norms of the music itself.  The makers of scoring programs have
every incentive to make the past printable, but little to make the future
printable.  And I have not solved the problem which, as the composer, it
is my responsibility to solve.

Modernism is in the same position, by violating norms of practice and
tradition, it is the responsibility of the supporters of the music to make
it realisable, not by force, but by finesse.  I wish for every time someone
wrote "it is the moral duty of musicians to play new music", they would
stop themselves, erase, and write instead "it is the moral duty of
musicians who play new music to realise it as music."

stirling s newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn