Jeremy Wright:
>I think that atonality is thought...tonality is not thought, it is the
>natural form of things. It just sounds right to people...Tonality existed
>first, and then began to learn more and more about music, and what could
>be done with it...
This reminds me SO much of another natural vs. unnatural argument very
lose to *my* heart. You are saying, in other words, that God created Adam
and Eve, not Adams and Lees. (Sorry, best I could do.)
Why is it necessary for the tonal/atonal* argument to go so far past the
simple issue of personal like and dislike, almost becoming a quasi-moral
issue of which one must permanently take a side? Wouldn't it be odd if
someone on here said in passing that he didn't like dark meat, and suddenly
the whole list was flooded with pro-dark meat/pro-white meat postings, with
even the list dignitaries jumping into the fray, ceremoniously delivering
wax-sealed proclamations for or against?
Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but: For whatever reason, in
the case of the tonal/atonal argument, the resolution seems to beg for
consensus, (a decision by all, for the good of all), rather than allowing
for one's individual tastes to govern the direction of his own musical
journeys--and this can give rise to some serious implications.
(*I'm using the word "atonality" as defined by its social construction,
rather than its precise meaning.)
Of course, the validity of a consensus can always be questioned:
Consensus can be artificially manufactured by a minority, as could
have been the case with academics pushing atonality on new students and
officially recognizing only those composers who embraced the technique;
consensus can be based on false premises--think of those who once declared
tonality as dead; and, as you've probably been dying to remind me,
consensus can evaporate, as most people now agree that tonality is not
dead, and atonality, once forbidding, is actually believed to have been
quite benign in the grand scheme of things.
But not unlike unsettling newspaper images of children playing with
the guns of dead soldiers on rubble-strewn and long-deserted streets, CM
enthusiasts to this day are picking up threads of the old argument, and as
you can see by Jeremy's statement above, the guns of false premise fire
just as easily today as they did years ago. I'll address some of those
beliefs below.
"Why did Schoenberg have to invent such a dissonant and ugly way
of writing?" We know this is not completely the case. If anything,
Schoenberg was what sociologists would call modern music's most famous
"moral entrepreneur." Moral entrepreneurs have strong convictions about
the desirability of new rules, and they seek to persuade others of their
views. ("I...will assure the supremacy of German music for the next
100 years.") He may have initiated a new musical school and defined,
(suggested), it's rules, but I wonder if this is not a double-edged sword:
It's wonderful to walk among like-minded individuals who share similar
preferences, and to enjoy the official recognizance of those preferences;
but it seems as though definitions of words like "atonality" ceased to
precisely describe certain technical *acts* which modern composers may
or may not have chosen to indulge in; they suddenly seemed to imply the
necessary *aim* of all modern composers who wanted to be defined as such.
Wagner had a school and followers, but Brahms, employing different
compositional techniques based upon his own individual preferences and
beliefs, didn't experience the kind of angst that Elgar and Puccini could
feel when writing differently than Schoenberg.
"Atonal music threatens the future existence of Classical Music and
therefore should be scorned." This is a fear distantly based upon Darwinian
biology: In the absence of a taboo against atonal music, CM would die out
because the union between composer, performer and listener would be broken
resulting in a dearth of new-listener offspring. This belief doesn't make
sense in a couple of ways. It assumes that so many composers were writing
atonally that repression was needed to keep them under control. Now that
the numbers are in we know that for every Schoenberg, there was a Schreker,
Strauss, and Puccini--the "Atonalists" have always distinctly remained in
the minority and not threatened CM as a whole. The belief also implies
that compositional preferences are exclusive; they're not--Copland "swung"
both ways, for instance.
"Why aren't we allowed to write beautiful, tonal music anymore?" A variant
of the above, dispelled by the above.
"Tonality existed first." An assertion that contemporary repression
against "Atonalists" is based upon tradition, as tonality has been
culturally transmitted through Western societies virtually unchanged from
one generation to the next. Fellow listers have already dispelled this
myth, reminding us that Medieval composers could pack more minor 2nds into
a work than Boulez, on occasion.
"The music was so ugly that I left my seat while they were playing and
banged my head against the stage on the way out." Not only is atonal music
not natural, but it offends the listener's sensibilities so much that his
reaction is stronger and more irrational than what one would expect from
a simple dislike: in other words, we aren't built for Atonal music--our
reaction stems from a natural internalized aversion. As Jan DeGaetani,
(a singer specializing in Modern music), has pointed out, her baby had
no problem palating the atonal music that she was practicing. In fact,
DeGaetani has observed her child actually singing recognizable atonal
fragments of the music it heard. This anecdote suggests that an
internalized aversion to atonal music has to be learned--it's not
something that we're born with.
Let's not forget that many non-Western cultures have been taking enormously
dissonant music, sometimes employing more than 12 notes in a scale, in
stride for thousands of years without so much as a grimace--their ears are
certainly built like ours, aren't they?
As long as Atonalists keep their lifestyle to themselves, they're ok with
me.
John Smyth
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