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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Music / Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
The Perfect Cadence and the Concert Hall
It is often said, but cannot be too often reiterated, that every human being is conditioned, to a degree impossible to fathom, by the assumptions of the culture in which he lives. The late Harry Partch called it bewitchment, and in a ringing phrase added, 'Like the Mindanao Deep in the Pacific, the bewitchment is deep and mysterious'. This deep and mysterious bewitchment pervades every aspect of our lives; the very structure of our language imposes modes of thought and perception upon us, our customs, mores and folkways seem to us God-given and inviolable, our science and technology seem final and uniquely valid answers to questions that are posed to us by nature. Our way of educating our young seems based on secure and obvious principles concerning the nature of knowledge and of the learning process, while our arts reflect culturally determined ways of perceiving and feeling, and in turn impose those ways back upon us; indeed, our arts can be seen from one point of view as metaphors for the attitudes and assumptions of our culture.
Here, for example, are a few sentences from Paul Henry Lang's monumental Music in Western Civilization, by common consent one of the great histories of western music in the English language. I have italicized some phrases which contain, by implication, major assumptions about the nature of music and of musical values; these are tacitly assumed to be of universal validity, but we shall see that they are in fact unique to post-Renaissance western music. He is discussing the early classical symphonists:
But orchestral "effect" and tone colour, however varied and rich, were never an end in themselves, for the classical style subordinated all details to the one central idea of organic growth, in which mere effects had no place unless they were in definite and logical relationship to the whole. This does not mean that the classical symphony did not abound in ingenious orchestral effects, but the latter are invariably motivated by the musical material and not by the technical possibilities of the instruments ... Orchestration and tone colour serve to solidify and set off the architectonic construction.
This conditioning, of course, is not necessarily to be deplored, but is to be thought of rather as a means by which we reduce the 'buzzing, blooming confusion' of external and internal stimuli to manageable order, and in more tranquil times men may live their lives well, quite unaware that other possible ways exist of organizing their experience. But although we cannot escape the conditioning which our culture imposes upon us we do not need to remain bewitched by it; the fish can learn to be aware of the water in which he swims. Indeed, in such times of profound and turbulent change as we seem to be entering at such uncomfortable speed, the need to do so becomes imperative and urgent.
Of all the arts, music, probably because of its almost complete lack of explicit verbal or representational content, most clearly reveals the basic assumptions of a culture; let us begin, then, by examining a phenomenon which is familiar to most music lovers: the great western post-Renaissance tradition, which lasted roughly from 1600 to 1910. This is the period of nearly all the well-known 'greats' of the concert and operatic repertory, and it is sometimes known, from its outstanding technical feature, as the period of tonal functional harmony. So close are we to this music that for many music lovers it occupies the whole field of their musical perception, and becomes the unique embodiment of what they think of as the eternal verities of the art. But, as Harry Partch observed, 'Music ... has only two ingredients that might be called God-given – the capacity of a body to vibrate and produce sound and the mechanism of the human ear that registers it ... All else in the art of music, which may be studied and analysed, was created by man or is implicit in human acts and is therefore subject to fiercest scrutiny.' In other words, certain assumptions of our 'classical' music tradition, which we think of as basic and universal elements of all music, are very far indeed from being so. Further, we need to disabuse ourselves of the delusion that western music is the supreme achievement of mankind in the realm of sound, and that other cultures represent merely stages in an evolution towards that achievement. Other cultures make other assumptions and are interested in other aspects of organized sound; they are neither inferior nor superior, only different, and comparative value judgements between ourselves and them are at best irrelevant, at worst tending to reinforce our dangerous delusion of European cultural superiority. Curt Sachs, in his attempt to summarize the wisdom of a lifetime of experience in world music, The Wellsprings of Music, says, 'We cannot escape the culture we ourselves have made. But seeing and weighing the difference between the two musical worlds might help us to realize that our gain is our loss, our growth is our wane. It might help us to understand that we have not progressed but merely changed. And, when seen from the cultural point of view, we have not always changed for the better.'
We should remember too that this tradition is geographically restricted to the peoples of the European subcontinent (and today its offspring and outposts) and that, even in terms of European history, it occupies only a very small portion of time, a mere three hundred years or so. Its assumptions are those of post-Renaissance humanism and individualism, and it has the characteristic virtues and limitations of that viewpoint. If we compare it with the music of the rest of Europe's history, not to mention that of the rest of mankind, it begins to look like something of an historical freak. This is not to deny the greatness of its achievements, but merely to point out that it has characteristics that are not shared by any of the world's other musical cultures, and that many of these characteristics are not necessarily more sophisticated or 'advanced' than those of other cultures – including that of our medieval ancestors. The notion of 'progress' may have some meaning in regard to science, which is concerned with the accumulation of abstract and objective knowledge divorced from personality, but is impossible to sustain in the arts, based as they are on experience, which is unique to the individual and must be renewed with each succeeding generation.
The music of the tonal-harmonic tradition over its three centuries or so of life is of course of an incredible richness and diversity. Nevertheless, there are certain characteristics which unite Monteverdi and Wagner, Beethoven and Delibes, Caccini and Reger, certain themes that can be traced throughout its history, and it is these that I shall now consider.
One could trace the origins of the tradition back beyond 1600, of course, perhaps at least as far as the work of Guillaume Dufay, whose motet Ave Regina Coelorum of 1474 contains, as Wilfrid Mellers points out, a beautiful early example of the minor third being used in contrast to the major third for dramatic, personal, expressive effect. Through the work of such masters as Dufay and Ockeghem, and of the great sixteenth-century contrapuntists, Palestrina, Byrd, Victoria and Lassus, we see the change in European consciousness that we call the Renaissance having its effect in music, with the personal, humanistic viewpoint substituted for the theocratic, universalistic viewpoint of the Middle Ages, expressed in technical terms by a greater interest in chords and their effects in juxtaposition, and specifically in the perfect cadence and the suspended dissonance, rather than in polyphony and the independent life of the individual voice. Thomas Mann makes one of the characters in his Doctor Faustus, the Jewish scholar Breisacher, turn the conventional view of these masters, as pure, abstract and infinitely lofty, on its head:
This, then, was the decline, namely the deterioration of the great and only true art of counterpoint, the cool and sacred play of numbers, which, thank God, had nothing to do with prostitution of feeling, or blasphemous dynamic ... The softening, the effeminizing and falsification, the new interpretation put on the old and genuine polyphony understood as a combined sounding of various voices into the harmonic-chordal, had already begun in the sixteenth century, and people like Palestrina, the two Gabrielis and our good Orlandi di Lasso ... had already played their shameful part in it. These gentlemen brought us the conception of the vocal polyphonic art, 'humanly' at first, oh yes, and seemed to us therefore the greatest masters of this style. But that was simply because for the most part they delighted in a purely chordal texture of phrase, and their way of treating the polyphonic style had been musically weakened by their regard for the harmonic factor, for the relation of consonance and dissonance.
Mann's narrator, a gentle, conservative academic, is shocked by such talk, and we are left wondering how tongue-in-cheek Mann was, but that passage does make clear the nature of the continuity between the work of the Renaissance masters and their successors after 1600. Nonetheless, something did change around that date, even though remnants of the older medieval tradition lingered even until the time of J.S. Bach. One might say that chords, and suspended dissonances, assembled in Renaissance music, started to move in the Baroque. As Richard Crocker says, 'Around 1600 several major shifts in emphasis coincided to give musical style a new shape. The main shift was a long-range one; long in the making, its effects are still operative today. It involved the recognition of harmonic triads as the basic units of musical composition. The significance of this shift is hard for us to grasp, simply because it took place; triads now seem obvious entities to us today because they became so around 1600, whereas they had not been so before.' It was at this time, too, that the shift of interest from the movement of individual voices, which almost incidentally made harmonic combinations, as in medieval polyphony, to progressions of triads, which governed voice movements and hence all melodic shapes, became so complete that a quantitative change became a qualitative one. At this point was born the technique of tonal functional harmony, the formalized movement of chords in succession which became an expressive means in its own right and was to be the dominant technique of western music for three centuries. I shall have more to say about tonal harmony later; here we need only note that tonality, the logical arrangement of chords around a key centre, became a major force in European music from around that date. With harmony, too, goes the concept of music as a drama of the individual soul, adumbrated in the work of the Renaissance masters, and brought to first maturity, conveniently in 1600, with the performance of the first real opera, Peri's L'Euridice, by a group of Florentine litterati and amateurs of music who believed themselves to be reviving the performance style of ancient Greek drama.
Such a definite date does not attach itself so easily to the end of the tonal-harmonic tradition, and the choice of 1910 is only arbitrary; indeed, certain aspects of the tradition survive today. But 1910 was Mahler's last complete year of life, and the year of Stravinsky's Firebird; by then Debussy had written La Mer, Schoenberg his Second String Quartet and Erwartung, Webern the Five Movements for String Quartet and Ives The Unanswered Question. True, much of the work of Strauss, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams and others still lay in the future; these represent the afterglow of the tradition, as beautiful perhaps and as moving as the afterglow of any glorious day. The real work of exploration had moved elsewhere. Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern in Europe, and Ives in America, were looking beyond the tonal-harmonic tradition, beyond the individualist-expressive function of music, and were beginning to explore a new landscape whose laws were not those of the logical daylit world of tonal harmony. In 1910, too, jazz, that most forceful of the many musical styles which emerged in the Americas from the enforced contact between African and European musics, was beginning its challenge to many orthodox western ways of making and listening to music.
Europe in the centuries before the Renaissance was an oral,mainly non-literate communal culture, not so very different in style from the rest of the world. It was around the middle of the fifteenth century that our culture began to reveal those new attitudes and concepts, ways of feeling, seeing and hearing, that were to cut Europe off from the rest of mankind and make her culture, including her music, unique. The changes are a familiar matter of history: the growth of humanism and individualism, the questioning of the theocentric world, and the desacralization of nature which gave rise to the scientific worldview, the 'invention' of man as a private individual – the last possibly associated with the contemporary development of printing and the rise of the printed book. These changes became visible in painting as far back as Giotto in the thirteenth century, long before they became audible in music. The medieval painter had seen his subject matter as it were under the eyes of God, who sees everything, to whom all events are simultaneous, and he gave expression to a communal, rather than a personal, consciousness. Thus we might have a painting of a city in which all its features are depicted in a way which would be impossible for an individual standing in a single spot to see, but which might be said to represent God's view, as well as the whole community's experience, of the city. As long as painters took such an attitude perspective did not develop, not because painters were not capable of it but because it was of no use or interest to them as a technique. Similarly, we might see the representation of the life of a saint, in which his birth, several miracles, his martyrdom and his apotheosis are all contained within the single visual field. This can be taken as representing not only the combined vision of all who knew the saint, the communal experience, but also the divine, timeless, god's-eye-view of his life, in which all events are, not foreordained, but simply simultaneous. (The painter was so little concerned with the individual experience that the picture was usually unsigned.) The post-Renaissance artist, on the other hand, saw his subject as if through the eye of a single spectator, in a particular spot at a particular instant. Perspective, the placing of all the elements of a picture in logical relation to one another and to a 'vanishing point', assumes that we look through the eyes of man rather than of God, the individual rather than the community, while the instantaneousness of the painter's vision speaks of a concept of time very different from the medieval. Man the individual, living in time, has displaced God, living in eternity, from the centre of the universe.
Sir Donald Tovey, writing in the nineteen-twenties, spoke more truly even than perhaps he knew when he called tonal harmony the musical analogue of perspective. Like perspective, tonal harmony is a logical affair, and expresses through its successions of tension and relaxation the experience of the single individual. Henri Pousseur has said, 'Tonal harmony is in fact the type of musical language in which the most transparent logic reigns, in which logic is truly made flesh, and becomes, as proof of the absolute transcendence of individual reason, the object of unique and irreplaceable pleasure'. Certainly quite untalented people, once they have grasped the nature of the logical relationships of triads within a key, can write perfectly correct (if uninspired) harmonic sequences, just as equally untalented people, once they have grasped the sets of logical relationships which surround the vanishing point, can make perfectly correct perspective drawings.
Logic, and logical relations, are in fact key concepts of western art. The work of art is logically explicable and ultimately knowable; nothing in the relationships which it contains can be left unclear or resistant to analysis. Every element relates logically to every other and to the main structure of the work. The listener to the music can 'hear his way' through the sounds, and understand the processes at work, even if he cannot put a name to them. And, as Pousseur says, it is tonal harmony which is at the heart of the logical processes of the music.
We need to be clear what we mean by 'tonal harmony'. It can be defined as the linking together of triads in succession in relation to a key centre, in such a way as to make a sequence which is meaningful and expressive to the accustomed ear; nearly everyone in western culture has become accustomed since infancy to comprehend these tonal sequences (if this seems like a circular definition, it is because comprehension of these harmonic sequences is essentially a learnt process). Harmony concerns itself with the relationships between triads rather than with the triads themselves, which acquire real meaning only when linked together in succession.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Music, Society, Education"
by .
Copyright © 1980 Christopher Small.
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