Jan Templiner replies to Don Satz:

>This may sound off-topic, but I don't think it is.  Taken Don's thoughts
>only one step further, all rules are worthless, because ultimately
>man-made.  Life wold end up in anarchy.

I don't get this from Don, and I doubt he would go this far.

>This of course includes music.  Do we really want music without rules?

This may be an argument about words rather than about ideas.  Rules imply
an externally-imposed propriety -- like the time the teacher rapped your
knuckles for saying "ain't." That has very little to do with the beauty and
effectiveness of language and everything to do with an easily-perceived
social propriety.  I think a better question might be, Do we really want
music without coherence? And, of course, the answer is most likely no.

However, in fact, most music -- good, bad, and indifferent -- is simply
beyond rule.  There's so much composers must make up as they go along
because each set of ideas and each consequence from these ideas blossom
into different shapes or imply different shapes.  No set of externally
imposed rules can cover the many situations that arise during the process
of composition.  Sonata-allegro form isn't really a form in the sense that
it is fixed, nor is something even as strict as so-called "school fugue."
These things are rhetorical processes.  It's not so much a matter of
filling the same bottles with new wine, but the wine somehow shaping its
bottle.  No two sonatas by Beethoven, as far as I'm aware, are structurally
identical, any more than any two fugues by Bach.

As far as our example of parallel fifths go, I can think of a good
musical reason for avoiding them *in certain kinds of music*, because
their presence reduces the contrapuntal independence of parts and hence
textural complexity.  But this assumes that the piece in question needs
either one of these things or needs them all the time.  Other than that,
their presence or lack makes first-year harmony exercises easier to grade.
Once we get into real music, however, while we can easily mark their
presence or absence, we're still left with the hard question of How
Effective?

>I rather live without parallel fifths in the few cases where they might
>be good than having no rules at all.  I may be conservative, old-fashioned,
>outdated or even badly informed (read: stupid), but I think this is one of
>the central problems of contemporary art: The lack of rules.

I keep hearing this and I think it only marginally accurate.  The real
problem of contemporary art is that there are many, many rules which
conflict and compete with one another.  Most people simply don't want to
go to the trouble of trying to assimilate essentially sui generis works
or works too different from what they already know.  The easy way out is
to say "The emperor has no clothes," but this attitude too often covers a
shirking of the auditor's responsibility to understand *before* dismissing.
Certainly, by itself such a stance helps nobody understand the art in
question.  Of course, charlatans appear in every age, but I doubt ours is
by percentage more cursed.

>The British baritone Thomas Allen stated something similar: "What
>bothers me is that traditional skills seem to be frowned upon now and
>are being dismantled little by little." (Source see below) Of course
>the 'right way' is somewhere in between.  Having rules, but not obeying
>them slavishly.  However, they should only be broken where it is to the
>advantage of the music.  But how does the composer know what is good,
>really? Of course s/he should have a feeling for it, but humans may err.
>Often breaking the rule is easier than obeying it.  Writing dense
>counterpoint without parallel fifths is more difficult than with them -
>thus composers are tempted to write the 'forbidden' stuff.

Writing dense counterpoint without parallel fifths is as easy as
writing it with parallel fifths.  Neither presence nor absence, however,
guarantees the quality of the work.  The point as ever is coherence and
aesthetic quality, and no rule safeguards these.  I must confess I read
Allen's remarks in full and have almost no idea what he's talking about
here, possibly because I almost never attend opera.  What he perceives
as "anything goes" may very well be the beginnings of a new kind of
discipline.  One hears the same bitching about early method actors from
the older presentational actors.  I doubt anyone today considers de Niro
a worse actor than Alfred Lunt.  However, their ranges and their milieu
differ.  Lunt could no more do Taxi Driver than de Niro could do The
Guardsman.

>But shouldn't we point that out? I think the audience has to demand that
>rules are followed, not applaud everything.

Well, this insults the audience.  They're just sheep, apparently.  I agree
that many standing O's I've seen I wouldn't give, but I certainly don't
question the sincerity of the audience.  I've heard reactions that have
been rather cold, and not just to contemporary work.  A performance of
Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in New Orleans a few years ago was greeted with
scattered applause, and departing ticketholders were complaining bitterly
that they stayed and listened to such "garbage." In New Orleans and
Cleveland, at any rate, the two venues I know best, I've not seen sheep.
I may not have agreed with the general judgment, but I can't say that it
was polite pretense, either.

Steve Schwartz