A question on the nature on music
It is a glorious day outside, and I am stuck on a horrific conference call, so I wreak my revenge (pronounced re-WENG-gee) by blogging.
There is a curious thing I have noticed in the musicology world. There seems to be a remarkable overlap between the people who study/research/adore early music and those who study/research/adore twentieth century music. I'll grant you that "Twentieth Century Music" is a near-useless term, since it implies that somehow Copland's Rodeo and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire belong to a common category (I'm willing to entertain arguments, but I've never heard any commonality between them). In this case, I am specifically talking about serialism, late-century avant-garde, atonalism - that wide category of music that I shall be calling "Music My Mom Doesn't Like."
My first real notice of this was during my Court Musical Patronage class, when Professor Heuchemer was incredibly excited about an avant-garde muscian who had visited campus recently. One of the pieces of music the musician had described involved taping staff paper to the backs of aquariums, dumping brine shrimp (AKA sea monkeys) into the tanks, and then having the musicians play the notes the brine shrimp indicated by swimming in front of the staff paper. Since then, during my grad school interviews, I met with Charles Atkinson at OSU, who speciales in the music and music theory of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but also does work on Viennese Classicism and twentieth century music. Naturally, the more times I notice this, the more I start looking for it, and it's struck me more and more.
I have been wondering why this sort of overlap exists. Why the dual fascination with both the very early and the very recent forms? My theory is that the common thread is musical (especially tonal) innovation. Perhaps there is a parallel here - on the one hand there's the development of our standard western tonal systems (including innovations like polyphony and counterpoint) and on the other there's the deconstruction of those systems.
Thoughts?
garden progress: The daffodils have been out for a week, the magnolia and hyacinths came out over the weekend, and some of the forsythia has bloomed. Nothing I did, obviously, but happy-making nonetheless.
house progress: Still trying to figure out how to run the new phone line to the TNI box
what's for dinner? Not sure yet - leaning toward some sort of "breakfast-for-dinner" thing. Maybe poached eggs and asparagus.
posted by Alison @ 2:16 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
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At 7:10 AM,
tommyspoon held forth...
- I don't know if I have an answer for you, Al, but I do know this: whenever academics get a hold of art my teeth begin to ache really badly, like I've just been force-fed rancid cotton candy.
In my mind, I've never been able to reconcile the two. Art is practiced/performed , over and over again, until perfected in some form. Academe is studied, over and over again, until a conclusion is made. One is active, the other passive. They both have their distinct functions and usefulness, but they don't seem to mix well. -
At 10:15 AM,
Hugh held forth...
- Spoon --
You should know better than to make blanket statements like that. :-)
On the performance side, the Beethoven symphonies were "perfected" by Karajan, until Roger Norrington got hold of them, and "perfected" them in a completely different way. On the academic side, the "conclusion" was that Jefferson was a god on earth, until we took into account that he was a slaveholder who slept with his property. Or the operas of Verdi and Rossini were trash and not worthy of the term "great art" until some scholars championed them. Academia does serve a purpose.
Alison:
I agree with you on the innovation front. I also think that both early and late music are still new frontiers. We "know" how to perform and listen to Mozart and Haydn. We, for the most part don't know how to listen to Machaut and Webern. A lot of musicology these days is the equivalent of the cloning of Dolly the sheep. Both contemporary and ancient music provide that rush of discovering something completely new. -
At 5:17 PM,
Alison held forth...
- Interesting....
Spoon - Honestly, I find the idea of art being perfected (or even "perfectable") to be totally alien to my experience. In fact, most of the time, I think you could make the argument that art (especially performance) is never done. There's always one more new angle to explore.
Also, the idea that academia is passive will come as a surprise to a lot of academics :-)
Hugh - in what way do we "not know how to listen" to Machaut (and I ask that as someone for whom early music is a fairly nebulous area, which may prove your point). I can see that with Webern or Schoenberg, or for that matter a lot of world music, but Machaut, Le Jeune, Lassus, and the like all sound very familiar to me. -
At 9:54 AM,
Hugh held forth...
- "I'd like to answer this question if I may in two ways. Firstly in my normal voice and then in a kind of silly high-pitched whine." I can't avoid quoting Python.
(1) I would separate Le Jeune and Lassus (early to mid-Renaissance) from Machaut. Machaut is in a different league, harmonically and rhythmically. When I sung the Messe de Notre Dame, it was HARD, especially as I was used to that classic Palestrina type counterpoint.
(2) With a lot of early music, or at least the music that has come down to us in written form, no instruments, voicings, tempi, or pitch levels were specified, and so much performance of said music is guesswork. Also we don't how much was implied in the score that is lost to us now. It's all evolving. It'll be interesting to see, when you take your Medieval/Rennaissance classes, how much the cutting edge, in terms of what we "know", has advanced since Music 13 with Toons.