| Wow! What an amazing thread this has turned out to be. Nothing silly, all the posts
interesting, full of detailed thoughts I could easily follow up - how to choose?
Well I cannot, except to give the thought that much of the discussion seems to turn
on what could be called (has been called?) 'the problem of 20th Century Music'. I
would explain that thus:
(yes, this is an apalling account of musical history, but bear with me...)
The development of musical content and form was until the end of the 19th century
essentially incremental - composers drew on,and added to, a familiar,
well-established canon of formal and stylistic structures, such that any non-naive
audience would recognize, farily reliably, what was going on. Even a huge
Brucknerian symphony could be recognized as sharing primary elements in common with
a 16th century dance, say, thanks to the persistent usefulness of Binary Form and
the Perfect Cadence.
With the 20th Century, we enter a new paradigm. A composer is less inclined to hang
melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, coloristic ideas on recognised forms and structures.
Instead, forms and structures (and in our case the sounds themselves) are invented
anew for each piece. There may be solid formal or philosophical reasons for this,
but it has undoubtedly left audiences (and even fellow composers) in something of a
quandary, lacking sufficient frames of reference which can assist in, or even
justify, listening. The verbose, and frequently highly technical, programme note
(unique to this century, so far as I can ascertain) is an hardly adequate
substitute. As recent posts have shown, this paradigm shift can provoke deep
feelings.
The quandary, for both composer and listener, can be summarized as follows.
1. The composer may use a structure for purely personal satisfaction, and has no
desire that the listener perceive it.
2. The use of a structure by a composer does not guarantee that a listener will
perceive it.
3. Failure to perceive a structure does not guarantee that there is no structure.
4(a). The perception of a structure does not guarantee that it is the structure the
composer designed (the 'Schenkerian paradox'?).
4(b). The perception of a structure does not guarantee that there is any structure
at all.
This probably applies to other art forms too.
The need to find structure and even 'meaning' where there may be none 'by design'
(I would cite Carl Sagan's apotheosis of pi in his novel 'Contact' as an example
here) seems to me to be one of the defining, and precious, aspects of the human
species (it is probably a sublimated survival mechanism) - but it amounts to
something of a lottery from the composer's point of view! A piece of music ends up
being a palimpsest - containing the forms the composer has created, the forms each
listener perceives in it, and perhaps even the forms the composer perceives in it.
Computer music, like Hamlet's clouds, seems especially well adapted to the
creation of 'emergent features'.
Given that we are unlikely to see a moratorium on new structures (to give audiences
time to accumulate experience), this quandary looks set to continue.
Richard Dobson
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