Making Sense Of Sound
Frodo Bernstein
* BOOKSHELF
* JANUARY 26, 2010, 11:14 P.M. ET
Making Sense Of Sound
Western music developed a 'grammar' and coherence�and then lost both.
By JAMES F. PENROSE
'Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there
was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or
bad by the pleasure it gave." With these words Plato complained about
the "promiscuous cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking" that
characterized the music of his time�the fourth century B.C. Even then,
it seems, music had a form and structure that guided it composition
and performance, for "law-abiding" musicians anyway.
In "A Language of Its Own," Ruth Katz shows how Western art music,
over the centuries, evolved a kind of "grammar" that listeners grasped
without overt instruction. Rules that had governed earlier music
helped to form still later rules, conferring "meaning" on what is,
after all, an abstract and otherwise contentless art form. This
grammar, Ms. Katz notes, gave an internal coherence to music and
allowed it to adapt to cultural and social change. It also created a
"shared understanding" between musicians and audiences, propelling
Western music's extraordinary ability to convey a variety of moods and
feelings.
In the late 19th century, however, music began to lose its broadly
shared, centuries-old coherence; and its self-perpetuating qualities
began to fall away. More and more, Ms. Katz chronicles, composers felt
compelled to write for themselves and their peers rather than for the
public, breaking rules (sometimes smashing them) on behalf of
individual expression and causing a rupture with the past. The results
are still with us today. "I can't be responsible for the audience,"
one modern British composer put it a few years ago. "I'm not running a
restaurant." Popular music and "world music" have usurped much of the
territory formerly occupied by classical music. How could this have
happened?
To explain, Ms. Katz goes back to the beginning. Western music, she
reminds us, evolved ever more rapidly once a system of written
notation was developed around the 10th century, leading to ever more
sophisticated harmonic possibilities. Monophonic (one�voiced) music is
relatively easy to perform (think of whistling), but polyphonic music
requires "controls" to prevent voices from interfering with one
another. The notational system facilitated such controls and, at the
same time, provided a visual record of the composer's intent, a record
that could be studied and written about. As Ms. Katz reminds us,
musicians writing about music played a key role in Western music's
evolution.
Over time, compositions increased in complexity: not only in their
harmony but in their rhythm and structural forms. Musical rules,
likewise, served an ever more complex "integrating" function. The
beauty of the system was that, while it constrained composers, it
produced works with sharply individual personalities. Starting in the
late Middle Ages, beautiful and increasingly varied works emerged as a
coherent musical language refined itself and adapted to changing
fashions.
By the mid-18th century, "diatonic" harmony�the basis of the classical
style and the basis of what we think of as tonality�was firmly
established. Composers structured their works around tonal plans that
linked movements through related keys (B-flat major and G minor, for
example, sharing a key signature) and conferred integrity to the
whole, much like the acts of a play. Rhythm, melody and harmony
combined to create not only "listenability" but an unmistakable
emotional atmosphere; listeners, in their turn, took away the sense
and emotion of a work as it was performed.
The apogee of such absolute music, Ms. Katz notes, was the classical
period of Mozart and Haydn. With the onset of the Romantic movement in
the 19th century, though, fundamental changes to musical grammar began
to show themselves, transporting audiences into new sonic realms. Ms.
Katz argues that such realms had less to do with deploying the
coherent musical language of the past than with manipulating or
exaggerating its grammar for the creation of effect. From critics and
listeners, a chorus of complaints echoed Plato's of two millennia
before.
[book012710]
A Language of Its Own
By Ruth Katz
University of Chicago Press, 354 pages, $48
Beethoven, in Ms. Katz's view, never damaged the system of harmonic
tonality and "integrated" form, for all his iconoclasm. But a
succession of composers�including Schumann, Liszt and, above all,
Richard Wagner�chipped away at coherence by introducing unprepared and
unresolved chords, chromatic alterations, and above all modulations
into remote keys. With his "unendliche Melodie" (infinite melody) and
other devices, Wagner savaged traditional musical structures even as
he created astonishingly beautiful music. By the early 20th century
composers like Sch�nberg and Scriabin had largely forsaken tonality.
Audiences were left to fend for themselves.
The gulf between past and present widened as the 20th century
progressed�but there were pockets of resistance, Ms. Katz observes.
Debussy joined the moderns in rebelling against the constraints of
harmonic tonality but found coherence in modal forms and in melodic
tonality. Composers like Bartok, Ravel and Janacek, though also
pushing the boundaries of traditional harmony, appealed to the ear by
retaining crucial elements of traditional tonality. Oddly, atonality
and aleatory music�both enjoying a vogue, among the elite, in early
and mid-20th century�have failed to find any real momentum, even
though they were viewed as contributions to musical "progress." In the
meantime, earlier styles�from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, for
instance�have captured the interest of serious listeners.
To be sure, "A Language of Its Own" is not a long moan about the rise
and fall of Western music. Ms. Katz is an elegant analyst, not a
polemicist. And she is hopeful that our musical tradition can regain
its footing, perhaps by re-creating the "abstracting" process that
allowed Western music, despite its inability to describe what it does,
to beguile and fascinate us for so long.
Mr. Penrose is a writer in London.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Lena
[further blather excised]
Unfortunately, these things are written by people who don't understand
sound, don't understand psychoacoustics, have a very narrow view of
what might constitute music, and whose general intelligence I wouldn't
stake too many beans on.
Lena
William Sommerwerck
> understand sound, don't understand psychoacoustics, have
> a very narrow view of what might constitute music, and whose
> general intelligence I wouldn't stake too many beans on.
So... are /your/ compositions for yourself, or for the audience?
People have trouble with music that has no obvious pattern. And after
they've listened to it a dozen times, and still hear no pattern, they're
likely to give up on it.
Bob Lombard
score is a rational process. Listening to (non-program, instrumental)
music is a sub-rational process, sometimes resulting in the
transference of non-trivial sub-rational messages. That's how it used
to be, when composers were still writing music. Some modern composers
immersed in psychoacoustics set down a series of stimuli, hoping to
pull the audience's strings - the same strings that Stephen King
reaches for. Other modern composers create a sort of aural puzzle,
hoping that some (but please not all) audience members will follow the
'music's' twists and turns and admire his cleverness.
That's just how it is.
bl
--
Music, a few books, a few movies
LombardMusic
http://www.amazon.com/shops/A3NRY9P3TNNXNA
Lena
> William Sommerwerck wrote:
> >> Unfortunately, these things are written by people who don't
> >> understand sound, don't understand psychoacoustics, have
> >> a very narrow view of what might constitute music, and whose
> >> general intelligence I wouldn't stake too many beans on.
>
> > So... are /your/ compositions for yourself, or for the audience?
>
> > People have trouble with music that has no obvious pattern. And after
> > they've listened to it a dozen times, and still hear no pattern, they're
> > likely to give up on it.
>
> Making [rational] sense of sound is a composer thing. Reading the
> score is a rational process. Listening to (non-program, instrumental)
> music is a sub-rational process, sometimes resulting in the
> transference of non-trivial sub-rational messages. That's how it used
> to be, when composers were still writing music. Some modern composers
> immersed in psychoacoustics set down a series of stimuli, hoping to
> pull the audience's strings - the same strings that Stephen King
> reaches for.
That's not at all correct. Just because the word 'psychoacoustics'
has 'psycho' in it doesn't mean that it deals with material having to
do with Stephen King... It doesn't. As opposed to acoustics, which
deals with the physics of sound, psychoacoustics deals with the
perception portion; that is, with the way sound is processed in the
ear and in the auditory system in general.
(This is not said in any hostile way, and I think you're a capable
person -- but whatever and regardless, what you say is not correct.)
> Other modern composers create a sort of aural puzzle,
> hoping that some (but please not all) audience members will follow the
> 'music's' twists and turns and admire his cleverness.
>
> That's just how it is.
That's not how it is...
Lena
mark
> Audiences were left to fend for themselves.
>
> The gulf between past and present widened as the 20th century
> progressed—but there were pockets of resistance, Ms. Katz observes.
> Debussy joined the moderns in rebelling against the constraints of
> harmonic tonality but found coherence in modal forms and in melodic
> tonality. Composers like Bartok, Ravel and Janacek, though also
> pushing the boundaries of traditional harmony, appealed to the ear by
> retaining crucial elements of traditional tonality. Oddly, atonality
> and aleatory music—both enjoying a vogue, among the elite, in early
> and mid-20th century—have failed to find any real momentum, even
> though they were viewed as contributions to musical "progress." In the
> meantime, earlier styles—from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, for
> instance—have captured the interest of serious listeners.
>
> To be sure, "A Language of Its Own" is not a long moan about the rise
> and fall of Western music. Ms. Katz is an elegant analyst, not a
> polemicist. And she is hopeful that our musical tradition can regain
> its footing, perhaps by re-creating the "abstracting" process that
> allowed Western music, despite its inability to describe what it does,
> to beguile and fascinate us for so long.
>
> Mr. Penrose is a writer in London.
>
> Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
$48 for a book that's under 400 pages? Someone has a high opinion of
the worth of their own opinion.
HvT
> Unfortunately, these things are written by people who don't understand
> sound, don't understand psychoacoustics, have a very narrow view of
> what might constitute music, and whose general intelligence I wouldn't
> stake too many beans on.
The problem of modern music is the problem of all modern art. One may
have such a broad view of it that at a certain moment someone has to
point out that a certain objet d'art isn't nature but culture, or has to
inform us what the essential difference is between a painting by the
chimpanzee Congo of by the artist who is exhibiting his work at the
local gallery, or has to explain to us why what doesn't remind us of
anything at all or doesn't move us in any way at all still deserves our
attention.
Modern art itself, in its extreme forms, doesn't express anything
anymore. Some have called this the liberation of nothingness. However,
since nothing remains nothing, even when liberated, the work of art has
to be positioned as a work of art by non-artistic means: by exhibiting
it in a gallery or by asking Sotheby to auction it or by getting grants
for performing and recording it.
In any case, since modern art, in it's extreme forms, no longer speaks
for itself and needs explanation, the general intellect of it's public
or audience has to be above average, which may atttract certain people
in certain circles - and may create a hype ...
Henk
Bob Lombard
Is so. :p
bl
laraine
wrote:
But randomness can give variety, which is
interesting.
And it can take years, not just a dozen
listenings, to learn to appreciate some
kinds of music.
C.
Bob Lombard
True. It can take years to work out the code. 10111010001111..., ad
infinitum.
bl
Peter T. Daniels
> $48 for a book that's under 400 pages? Someone has a high opinion of
> the worth of their own opinion.-
??? When's the last time you were in a bookstore?
(And since when does an author have any say in the list price of their
book?)
laraine
10 2
11 3
10 2
10 2
00 0
11 3
11 3
2,3,22,33,222,333,2222,3333
2 3 22 0 33 222 0 333 2222 0 3333
Well, you can goof around with it like
playing solitaire....The 0 seems to make
it a bit random if you look at it that way.
C.
John Wiser
wrote:
>> $48 for a book that's under 400 pages?
>> Someone has a high opinion of the worth of their own opinion.-
> ??? When's the last time you were in a bookstore?
> (And since when does an author have any say
> in the list price of their book?)
Daniels is entirely right. The more specialized the market,
the pricier the book. That is not under the authors' control.
In the interests of full disclosure, and a good example:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=william+bright+peter+daniels+&x=18&y=19
--
John Wiser
Jicotea Used Books
Howells NY 10932 0136 USA
cee...@gmail.com
http://www.amazon.com/shops/ceeclef
Lena
wrote:
> Lena wrote:
> > On Jan 27, 7:27 am, Bob Lombard <thorsteinnos...@vermontel.net> wrote:
> >> That's just how it is.
>
> > That's not how it is...
>
> Is so. :p
>
:p:p
Oh, that's what all those marks in scores are - attempts at smileys?
I suddenly feel much more enlightened about this whole composer
communicating to posterity business...
Lena
O
<d5966b0a-2f80-4a91...@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
Lena <emsw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 27, 10:43�am, Bob Lombard <thorsteinnos...@vermontel.net>
> wrote:
> > Lena wrote:
> > > On Jan 27, 7:27 am, Bob Lombard <thorsteinnos...@vermontel.net> wrote:
> > >> That's just how it is.
> >
> > > That's not how it is...
> >
> > Is so. �:p
> >
> (laugh)
> :p:p
>
> Oh, that's what all those marks in scores are - attempts at smileys?
The composer is pre-emptively laughing at our feeble attempts to play
his music. Of course, it's a soft laugh, sometimes a very, very soft
laugh.
-Owen
mark
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:On Jan 27, 1:28 pm, mark
> wrote:
>
> >> $48 for a book that's under 400 pages?
> >> Someone has a high opinion of the worth of their own opinion.-
> > ??? When's the last time you were in a bookstore?
> > (And since when does an author have any say
> > in the list price of their book?)
>
> Daniels is entirely right. The more specialized the market,
> the pricier the book. That is not under the authors' control.
> --
> John Wiser
> Jicotea Used Books
> Howells NY 10932 0136 USA
I don't go to bookstores much, just I like I don't go to record stores
much. I buy my books online, usually through Amazon (where I recently
purchased Vincent Bugliosi's 1600-plus page "Reclaiming History" for
$14.99).
True, my OP was a bit facetious. Still, $50 for this book seems steep
to me. I'll wait for the remainder sale. I'm sure some distributor
already has a put option on this book.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Jan 27, 1:45 pm, "John Wiser" <ceec...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:On Jan 27, 1:28 pm, mark
> > wrote:
>
> > >> $48 for a book that's under 400 pages?
> > >> Someone has a high opinion of the worth of their own opinion.-
> > > ??? When's the last time you were in a bookstore?
> > > (And since when does an author have any say
> > > in the list price of their book?)
>
> > Daniels is entirely right. The more specialized the market,
> > the pricier the book. That is not under the authors' control.
> > In the interests of full disclosure, and a good example:https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-...
> > --
> > John Wiser
> > Jicotea Used Books
> > Howells NY 10932 0136 USA
> > ceec...@gmail.comhttp://www.amazon.com/shops/ceeclef
>
> I don't go to bookstores much, just I like I don't go to record stores
> much. I buy my books online, usually through Amazon (where I recently
> purchased Vincent Bugliosi's 1600-plus page "Reclaiming History" for
> $14.99).
It's a Bargain Book (i.e., remaindered) at both Borders and Barnes &
Noble for $5.99 or so.
Even The Clinton Tapes, out just a few months, is on the 50% table. (I
think a lot of buyers must have been put off by the title -- it
doesn't, in fact, contain transcripts of the tapes the author made
with the President throughout his term, but only his recollections of
what was said during the interviews.)
> True, my OP was a bit facetious. Still, $50 for this book seems steep
> to me. I'll wait for the remainder sale. I'm sure some distributor
> already has a put option on this book.-
The list price for a 200-page novel is $26 (or more?) these days. But
they'll usually take 30% off -- off anything, if you're a Borders club
member (no annual fee, unlike at B&N).
So sign up for a Borders card and wait for the email -- you'll have
discount coupons every week. Once in a while, even 40%.
mark
I have a Borders card already. The last book I bought there was
Isaacson's Einstein bio for $8. I couldn't get through the first 50
pages. Something about Isaacson's writing style made it turgid going.
I'd read 15 pages, look at the clock and realize an hour had passed.
Very strange. it was like eating beets.
Bob Lombard
> I have a Borders card already. The last book I bought there was
> Isaacson's Einstein bio for $8. I couldn't get through the first 50
> pages. Something about Isaacson's writing style made it turgid going.
> I'd read 15 pages, look at the clock and realize an hour had passed.
> Very strange. it was like eating beets.
Harvard beets as a side dish? Good and good fer yah.
mark
> mark wrote:
> > I have a Borders card already. The last book I bought there was
> > Isaacson's Einstein bio for $8. I couldn't get through the first 50
> > pages. Something about Isaacson's writing style made it turgid going.
> > I'd read 15 pages, look at the clock and realize an hour had passed.
> > Very strange. it was like eating beets.
>
> Harvard beets as a side dish? Good and good fer yah.
>
Peter T. Daniels
Then you know perfectly well that, if you want to own the $48 book
that is the origin of this thread, it will cost you as little as
$28.80 if you wait for the best coupon they send.