If one needs one of many exhibits as to why classical music is dying, then
the insular - indeed clubbish - nature of many of its institutions is at
the heart of the problem. Musicians complain about closed methods for
choosing conductors, critics complain that conductors are not local, and
thus have no roots, orchestra boards complain about the musicians union.
One might be tempted to call it a conspiracy, but it isn't - it is
many thousand small conspiracies, each one run by people who, when given
a choice between doing the ethical thing, and doing that which makes
their life, job and existence easier in the short term, have no trouble
justifying doing what makes their life easier. And they lean on someone
else. That someone else has a choice - suffer in silence, or lean on the
next person down the chain. The music director programs an awful work by
a close friend, the critic pans it harder than perhaps it deserves, the
reader of the newspaper complains to his friends.
Bad blood is generated.
- - -
The field of music theory is one where social wars are re-fought.
Long after the participants are dead, there are those who are trying to
understand the participants. This means, like old men playing war games,
they must soak themselves in ideas and strategies of discourse which are
long dead.
Pick up a music theory work, and chances are it falls into one of three
categories.
One large category might be called the mechanical view - descended from new
criticism, and steeped in the pseudo-mathematicism and scientificism of the
20th century, it pretends that one can deal with music as pitch classes and
diagrams.
Another large category might be called the post modern school - which is
composed of trying to second guess the composer's cultural milieu and
outlook.
A third category might be called the cultural critic view - which emulates
the old model of the critic mediating between a lay public and a musical
priesthood, telling us as to what Shostakovich was really saying when he
wrote this or that note.
- - -
All of these categories are obsolete and destructive to the real nature of
music theory. And what is that nature? And what gives me the right to tell
and entire field of well paid farts where to get off.
Second question first. The second question is answered by the sheer
uselessness of their production - what have they written which is worth
reading. The answer is that the only musicology people care about is that
which is used to reconstruct unfinished works - in other words mimetic
study.
The first question is as easily answerable, and very much to the point.
Our present theory of music is as true a picture of music as pre-telescopic
astronomy was a true picture of the solar system. Pre-telescopic astronomy
was monstrously practical - it predicted where and when events of interest,
such as eclipses or tides, would occur. Similarly, our musical theory is
completely obsessed with the predicting the movements of existing works,
and justifying the creations of those who engage in theory and composition.
However, the telescope for the mind has been invented. Like Galileo's
Early model, all it has really done is teach us to tear up our old views
of cognition and throw them out. However, like the catholic church in
the late renaissance, our present society has a vested interest in the old
view of thinking about thinking, and hence is busy burning heretics at the
stake. Eventually enough non-threatening people will believe the evidence
presented to them, and the system will change. But there are a great many
marshmallow roasts between here and there.
When Galileo first peered through his telescope, he was puzzled and dazzled
by what he saw. He sketched, noted methods, tried to formulate rules of
proceeding. He backtracked, broke his own rules, attempted to reformulate.
In short the messy process of dealing with information that shattered the
past views of knowledge. Information which cannot be organized by the old
laws.
What we see, now, when we look at devices which show the brain in operation
is much the same. What is really going on we don't know, what is not going
on we do know - and what is not going on is almost every previous means of
dealing with thinking.
This is a large claim, but it can be examined and elucidated.
The first part is rather simple - any theory of music or criticism in
general presupposes that a certain means of the brain processing music.
This is unavoidable and axiomic. If you suppose that "x" happens, then you
must suppose that whatever parts of the brain make "x" happen also occur.
Of the views of music theory put forward above, all three map to particular
models of how the brain works.
The easiest to dispose of is the theory of "music is a language". Perhaps
in some metaphorical sense, but not in the actual sense. The mechanisms of
language - grammar formation, noun selection, phoneme translation - are not
active when listening to music. Any notion that music has a generative
grammar that is the same as languages is simply incorrect. This does not
mean we cannot make analogies to grammar - as we do with computer languages
or even physical processes such as the codification of genetic material
with letters of DNA - but they are analogies only.
The cultural view of musical criticism - descended from post structuralism,
similarly falls by the way side. Every functioning human being has
mechanisms which mediate cultural normality. Malfunctions of these
regions of the brain cause people to be unable to comply with cultural
requirements. They too, are not active during the musical experience.
If they are not active, then the entire cultural determinacy theory of
music is dead in the water. The accused didn't do it your honor, he was
asleep in bed.
What then of the last theory - surely the time honored roll of explication
does not match to some theory of cognition. In fact, it does, it states
that the composer's mind works the same way the critics does. Given the
composers have a relatively bad track record at psyching out other
composers - the music academic grinding away has no chance at all.
- - -
So what is left?
It might surprise people, but we still, every day, rely on the same ideas
of the solar system that the ancients used. When navigating, one does not
treat the solar system as revolving around the sun, but uses a "celestial
mechanics" which treats the sky as a globe and measures as if the earth
were at the center of the universe - vernal equinox, degrees of arc and
constellations mapped on areas of this globe included. Just so, for
practical elucidation of existing styles - there is no reason to appeal to
cognitive mechanics. Mozart wrote his works according to certain methods,
and understanding those methods is a way of decoding the instructions left
behind. It is a way of completing unfinished works or improvising in the
specific style. The sextant is still a useful tool, and while there is no
mental mechanism that favors the tonal vocabulary, an sich, it is still
useful to know the topic if one is navigating the waters of tonal music.
This field will, of course, be ever expanding as new working methods are
created. The distillation of all the possible musics into the one that is
one person's mind, and the ability to create regularly mean that there will
always be a method to the madness, and there will always be a need to
distill that method to recognisable steps.
But what of the true nature of music - does it consist of some metaphysical
project to ennoble or enlighten? No. It consists of the task of being
musical, and understanding that, which because it is always, in Aristotle's
way of saying things - coming to be and passing away - cannot be fixed in
any pure word form.
And it is this true nature of music that our hackademics have been
particularly dense to - many of them could be living in 1910, 1930 or 1950.
And hence their writing is as useful as alchemical textbooks.
No wonder they want the doors closed, they are on the dole, producing junk,
and need to maintain what Shaw would call "the conspiracy against the
laity".
- - -
Which returns one to the original theme - feudalism was the system of
government where thousands of petty barons had the power over life and
death, and were unanswerable to the outside. Historically speaking, it is
normal for people to live in this, or in some modified tribal form which
has the same features on a localized scale. However feudalism produces a
kind of limited ossification over time.
Last week the example that crossed my desk was Vroon, the week before,
a hypocritic for the New York Times, before that, I think it was the
questions over who would follow Seiji Ozawa in Boston. In each case the
people whose particular ox was being gored snorted and angrily fired back
personal insults - defending their particular piece of turf. But each one
was, in turn, off the mark - it is the system itself of having petty
warring fiefs which I oppose, and which is hindering classical music.
As one scholar put it "I study the middle ages, I don't want to live
there."
Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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