Stephen Heersink wrote:
>"The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous,
>unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm,
>and timbre" is the definition the American Heritage Dictionary gives for
>"music." I think this definition "fits" most people's conceptual scheme
>of what makes music "music" and which distinguishes music from noise.
>
>Duodecaphonic compositions do not always have melody, harmony, or both,
>and therefore do not always fit the shared conceptual understanding of
>music. Simply ordering all twelve chromatic pitches, or the sharing of
>the use of similar instruments, aren't sufficient to merit duodecaphonic
>compositions with the appellation of "music."
Whose shared conceptual understanding? Classical Indian music, as well
as the classical music from a number of other sophisticated, non-Western
traditions, doesn't "have harmony" either (or, in the case of Indonesian
Gamelan, any melody that I can identify) but it's all clearly music. Any
"harmonies" that occur in classical Indian music are incidental and are not
a structural component of the system in the way that they are in Western
classical music of the last 250 or so years. I'm not even sure that many
folks whose entire musical experience is comprised wholly of Western
classical or popular music would find classical Indian, Korean, or Iranian
music melodic. I don't think that not having the kind of harmonic or
melodic structures typical of the Western perfect-triadic, equal-tempered
system automatically disqualifies something from being music. Would one
disqualify Gregorian or Sarum chant from being music on that basis? I think
not.
Dodecaphonic music does involve quite a bit more than "simply ordering
all 12 chromatic pitches." Melody, harmony (in the sense of simultaneous
sonorities, perhaps, rather than progressions based on perfect triads),
rhythm, and timbre are present in dodecaphonic music in any event - just
not in the forms we in the West have grown most acclimated to in the past
250 years.
By the way, I highly recommend Charles Rosen's excellent little book on
Arnold Schoenberg for anyone interested in a lucid, not overly technical
explanation of the development of pan-tonal and serial music and how it
"works."
Kathleen O'Connell
Second Viennese Groupie
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