The Hardline according to Ms. Wang:

>Not at all.  Since the entire process of atonal composition is inconducive
>to producing anything resembling beauty, it does not take a leap to dislike
>every last one of them.

For this to be so either everyone who likes any piece of music that is
atonal is either crazy or a liar.  We would then have to throw Britten
into the bin, because his praise for Berg's Violin Concerto was quite high,
and so too must we toss in Gustav Mahler, who was enthusiastic about the
explorations of his younger colleage Arnold Schoenberg.  Also Bela Bartok
must be, according to the dictum that all atonal music is incompatible with
beauty - since he wrote several articles in support of Atonal music,
particularly the piano works of Schoenberg.

We must, alas, also conclude that Franz Liszt was as well - since he wrote
at least one work without tonality.  Likewise we must condemn Micheal
Tilson Thomas, Mutter and James Levine - all supporters of individual works
which are, in the common parlance, atonal.

- - -

But let us sit down and look at the foolishness of this argument.  Imagine
we were in 1849, and one person stood up and said "the tragedy of music is
the retreat from polyphony, homophonic music is incompatible with beauty."
I pick this date because in 1849, homophony had been controversial about
a century before - with Gluck.

Or let us imagine someone saying in 1899 "The work of Beethoven is a
perversion of Haydn and Mozart - his structures are incomprehensible, and
his melodies without the slightest beauty."

The simple truth of chromatically organised pantonal music - is that it is
the revolution of the great grandfather's and grandfathers.  No one on this
list was born contemporaneously with Schoenberg, or even of the second wave
- Bartok, Berg, Webern, Hindemith.  To be contemporaneous with the third
wave would make you quite old - Carter, Boulez, Stockhausen, Lutoslawski,
Penderecki, Berio.

The sad truth is that atonality has come, and is already going out as the
revolutionary question of music.  The arc is complete and hence forward
even the most conservative of composers will borrow from it without anyone
raising much of an eyebrow.

But let me draw another comparison.  By 1776 the idea of democracy was
well enough established that a people were willing to stake "our lives,
our fortunes and our sacred honor" on establishing a confederation based on
the idea.  By the early 1800's revolutions swept South America and Europe.
Imagine a century later fighting a war to preserve aristocracy.  And yet,
in 1914 the young men of Europe were sent out by King, Kaiser, Emporer and
Tsar to do just this.  And what followed was the most stupid war in the
history of Europe.  Classical music has been engaged in an argument over
the inevitable for as long.

- - -

The truth, unpleasant as it may be for many, is that the entire argument
has a baroque tinge to it.  On one side the people who, priests of the
revealed word, feel that art is for enlightening the masses, on the other
those who preach that arts purpose is to amuse.  The other truth is that
the problems of music have long since passed this argument by.  I say this
as a composer who finds himself in the situation that *not one* major score
program notates my music correctly, they all produce unreadable output.
Sibelius, Finale, Engraver - to a one are incapable of handling the most
trivial problems of notation, and as a result, the scores they produce are
useless to musicians - unreable jungles of ties and slurs.  If I were to
write in the style of Schoeberg in 1909 - like say Kirchner - it would be
child's play to get the scores to print, and there would be musicians
familiar with the idiom.  Sibelius handles Ligetti with ease, and Engraver
is capable of dealing with the intricacies of Lutoslawski.  But none one of
them can handle simple poly rhythmic structures, fractional time signatures
and the like.

The problems of music have moved on, and the proof is that the forefront of
musical thinking lies where notation has broken down - where the composer
can hear in his mind a pure and moving flow of music, which, none the less,
is inexpressible in notational terms to a sufficent degree of accuracy to
be played.

This is the real tragedy of this long running feud between the musical
Hatfields and the musical McCoy's - the questions of music have passed them
by and are right now being struggled with, unsung and ignored, while the
questions of 1913 are endlessly rehashed.  More over, it means that those
who are puzzled by this age - as opposed to the Edwardian - are barred from
finding an art music which confronts the present with anything other than
a pastiche of techniques borrowed from rock and advertising and musty
textbooks written by dead people who were students of people who are even
longer dead.

stirling s newberry
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