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Title: Tonality and Totality Author: John Zerzan Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: music, primitivist Source: Retrieved on May 18, 2013 from http://www.t0.or.at/zerzan/politon.htm
The defining of sentiments has always been a preoccupation of religions
and governments. But for quite some time music, with its apparent
indifference to external reality, has been developing an ideological
power of expression hitherto unknown. Originally music was a utility to
establish the rhythms of work, the rhythms of dances which were ritual
observances. And we know that it was treated as a vital symbolic
reinforcement of the “harmony” of ancient Chinese hierarchical society,
just as to Plato and Aristotle it embodied key moral functions in the
social order. The pythagorean belief that “the whole cosmos is a harmony
and a number” leapt from the fact of natural sonic phenomena to an
all-encompassing philosophical idealism, and was echoed about a thousand
years later by the seventh century encyclopedist lsadore of Seville, who
asserted that the universe “is held together by a certain harmony of
sounds, and the heavens themselves are made to revolve” by its
modulations. As Sancho Panza said to the duchess (another thousand years
down the road), who was distressed at hearing the distant sound of an
orchestra in the forest, “Where there is music, Madam, there could be no
mischief.”
Indeed, many things have been said to characterize the elusive element
we know as music. Stravinsky, for example, was quite serious in denying
its expressive, emotional aspect: “The phenomenon of music is given to
us for the sole purpose of establishing order in things, and chiefly
between man and time.” It does seem clear that music calms the sense of
time’s oppressiveness, by offering, in its patterns of tensions and
resolutions, a temporal counterworld. As Lévi-Strauss put it, “Because
of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening
to it immobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches
and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind.”
But, contra Stravinsky, there is clearly more to music, more to its
compelling appeal, of which Homer said, “We only hear, we know nothing.”
Part of its mysterious resonance, if you will, is its simultaneous
universality and immediacy. Herein lies also its ambiguity, a cardinal
feature of all art. An Eisenstadt photograph of 1934, entitled “The Room
in which Beethoven was Born,” testifies to the latter point; just as he
was about to take the picture, a party of Nazis arrived and placed a
commemorative wreath — shown in the foreground — before the room’s bust
of Beethoven.
So the great genre of inwardness that is music has been appropriated to
many purposes and philosophies. To the Marxist Bloch, it is a realm
where the utopian horizon already “begins at our feet.” It lets us hear
what we do not have, as in Marcuse’s poetic formulation that music is “a
remembrance of what could be.” Although representation is already
reconciliation with society, there is always a moment of longing in
music. “Something is lacking, and sound at least states this lack
clearly. Sound has itself something dark and thirsty about it and blows
about instead of stopping in one place, like paint,” to quote Bloch once
more. Adorno insisted that the truth of music is “guaranteed more by its
denial of any meaning in organized society,” consonant with a retreat
into aesthetics as his choice for the last repository of negation in an
administered world.
Music, however, like all art, owes its existence to the division of
labor in society. Although it is still generally seen in isolation, as
personal creation and autonomous sphere, social meaning and values are
always encoded in music. This truth coexists with the fact that music
refers to nothing other than itself as is often said, and that what it
signifies is, at base, always determined solely by its inner
relationships. It is valid to point out, after Adorno, that music can be
understood as “a kind of analogue to that of social theory.” If it keeps
open “the irrational doorways” through which we glimpse “the wildness
and the pang of life,” according to Aaron Copland, its ideological
component must also be recognized, especially when it claims to
transcend social reality and its antagonisms.
In “The Rational and Social Foundations of Music” Weber (as elsewhere)
concerned himself with the disenchantment of the world, in this case
searching out the irrational musical elements (e.g. the 7^(th) chord)
which seemed to him to have escaped the rationalistic equalization that
characterizes the development of modern bureaucratic society. But if
non-rationalized nature is a rebuke to equivalence, a reminder and
remainder of non-identity, music, with its obsessive rules, is not such
a reminder.
Research carried out at the University of Chicago demonstrated that
there are more than thirteen hundred discernible pitches available to
melodic consciousness, yet only a very small fraction of them are
allowed. Not even the eighty-eight tones of the piano really come into
play, considering the repetition of the octave structure — another
aspect of the absence of free or natural music.
Not reducible to words, at once intelligible and untranslatable, music
continues to refuse us complete access. Lévi-Strauss, introducing The
Raw and the Cooked, even went so far as to isolate it as “the supreme
mystery of the science of man (sic), a mystery that all the various
disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.”
This essay locates the fundamentals rather more simply, namely in the
question of music’s perennial combination of free expression with social
regulation; more precisely in this case, with an historical treatment of
that which is our sense of music, Western tonality. Put in context, its
standardized grammar to a large extent answers the question of what it
is that music says. And the depth of its authority may be understood as
applicable to Nietzsche’s fear that “We shall never be rid of God so
long as we still believe in grammar.”
But before situating tonality historically, a few words are in order
toward defining this basic musical syntax, a cultural practice which has
been termed one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western
civilization. First, it must be stressed that, contrary to the assertion
of major theorists of tonal harmonics from Rameau to Schenker, tonality
was not destined by the physical order of sounds. Tone, almost never
found fixed at the same pitch in nature, is divested of any natural
quality and shaped according to arbitrary laws; this standardization and
strict distancing are elementary to harmonic progress, and tend toward
an instrumental or mechanical expression and away from the human voice.
As a result of the selection made in the sound continuum by an
arbitrarily imposed scale, hierarchical relations are established among
the notes.
Since the Renaissance (and until Schoenberg), Western music has been
conceived on the basis of the diatonic scale, whose central element is
the tonic triad, or defined key, which subordinates the other notes to
it. Tonality actually means the state of having a pitch — the tonic, as
it is most simply called — that has authority over all the other tones;
the systematics of this leading-note quality has been the preoccupation
of our music. Schenker wrote of the tonic’s “desire to dominate its
fellow tones”: in his choice of words we can already begin to see a
connection between tonality and modern class society. The leading
theorist of tonal authority, he referred to it in 1906 as “a sort of
higher collective order, similar to a state, based on its own social
contracts by which the individual tones are bound to abide.”
There are many who still hold that the emergence of a tonal center in a
work is an inevitable product of natural harmonic function and cannot be
suppressed. Here we have an exact parallel to ideology, where the
hegemony of the frame of reference that is tonality is treated as merely
self-evident. The ideological miasma which helps make other social
constructs seem natural and objective also hides the ruling prejudices
that are embedded in the essence of tonality. It is, nonetheless, as
Arnold Schoenberg suggested, a ‘device’ to produce unity. In fact, tonal
music is full of illusion, such as that of false community, in which the
whole is portrayed as being made up of autonomous voices; this
impression transcends music to provide a legitimizing reflection of the
general division of labor in divided society.
Dynamically speaking, tonality creates a sense of tension and release,
of motion and repose, through the use of chordal dissonance and
consonance. Movement away from the tonic is experienced as tension,
returning as a homecoming, a resolution. All tonal music moves toward
resolution in the cadence or close, with the tonic chord ruling all
other harmonic combinations, drawing them to itself, and embodying
authority, stability, repose. Supramusically, a nostalgically painful
attitude of wandering and returning runs through the whole course of
bourgeois culture, and is ably expressed by the very movement basic to
tonality.
This periodic convergence toward a point of repose enabled increasingly
extended musical structures, and the areas of tonal expectation and
fulfillment came to be placed further apart. It is not surprising that
as the dominant society must strive for agreement, assent — harmony —
from its subjects through greater distances of alienation, tonality
develops more distant departures from the certainty and repose of the
tonic and thus lengthier delays in gratification. The forced march of
progress finds its correspondence in the rationalized
direction-compulsion of tonic-dominant harmony, complete with a
persistent patriarchal character.
Three centuries of tonality also tend to bury awareness of its
suppression of earlier rhythmic possibilities, its narrowing of the
great inner variety of the rhythm to a schematic alternation of
‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed’. The rise of tonality similarly coincided
with the coming to power of symmetrical thinking and the recapitulating
musical structure, the possibility of attaining a certain closure by
means of a certain uniformity. Chenneviére, in discussing tonality’s
newly simplified and intellectualized system of notation, discerned “a
most radical impoverishment of occidental music,” referring mainly to
the symmetrical balancing of clause against clause and the emphasis on
chordal repetition.
In the early nineteenth century, William Chappell published a collection
of “national English airs” (popular songs) in which academic harmonic
patterns were imposed on surviving folk melodies, older melodies
suppressed and “irregular tunes squared off.” The binarism of the basic
major key-minor key had come to prevail and, as Busoni concluded, “The
harmonic symbols have fenced in the expression of music.” The emergence
of tonality corresponded to that of nationalized and centralized
hierarchy which came to pervade economic, political and cultural life.
Ready-made structures of expressivity monopolize musical subjectivity
and patterns of desire. Clifford Geertz makes this pertinent judgment:
“One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all
begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand lives but end in the
end having lived only one.”
Tonality in music may be likened to realism in literature and
perspective in painting, but it is more deeply ingrained than either.
This facilitates a would-be transcendence of class distinctions and
social differences under the sign of a ‘universal’ key-centered music,
triumphant since tonality defined the realm of mass musical appreciation
and consumption. There is no spoken language on the planet which even
begins to compete with the accessibility tonality has provided as a
means of human expression.
Any historical study that omits music risks a diminished understanding
of society. Consider, for example, the ninth-century efforts of
Charlemagne to establish uniformity in liturgical music throughout his
empire for political reasons, or the tenth-century organ in Winchester
Cathedral with its four hundred pipes: the height of Western technology
to that time. It is at least arguable that music, in fact, provides a
better key’ than any other to the understanding of the changing spirit
of this civilization. To refocus on tonality, one can, using
conventional periodization, locate perhaps its earliest roots in the
transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance era.
If the eminent medievalist Bloch is correct in characterizing medieval
society as unequal rather than hierarchical, there is a definite cogency
to John Shepherd’s interpretation of the faint beginnings of the tonal
system as the encoding of a new hierarchical musical ideology out of a
more mutual one which idealized its own, earlier society. The medieval
outlook, based on its decentralized and localized character, was
relatively tolerant of varying world views and musical forms, and did
not consider them as basically destructive of its feudal ideological
foundation. The emerging modern world, however, was typified by greater
division of labor, abstraction, and an intolerant, totalizing character.
Uniform printing, and a print literacy corrosive of oral, face-to-face
traditions, explains some of the shift, as movable type provided a model
for the proto-industrial use of individuals as mechanically interacting
parts of a machine. Indeed the invention of printing at about 1500 gave
musical notation great scope, which made possible the role of composer,
by the separation of creator and performer and the downgrading of the
latter. Western culture thus soon produced the completely notated
musical work, facilitating a formal theory of composition at the expense
of an earlier predominance of improvisation along certain guidelines. In
this way print literacy and its dynamic uniformity led to a growing
harmonic explicitness.
Some musicologists have even located a recurrent urge to curb the
“recalcitrant independence” of the individual parts of polyphonic
multi-voiced music in the interests of harmony and order, dating back to
the late thirteenth century. Ars nova, the principal musical form of the
fourteenth century, illustrates some of the tendencies at work in this
long transitional period of pre-harmonic polyphony. Early on, and
especially in France, Ars nova reached a stunning degree of rhythmic
complexity that European music would not achieve again until
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring five centuries later. But this very
complexity, increasingly based on an abstract conception of time, led to
an extraordinary refinement of notation, and hence pointed away from a
music based on the singing voice and away from melodic subtlety and
rhythmic flexibility. Formalization seems always to imply reduction, and
in turn a nascent feeling for tonic-dominant relationships was manifest
by the mid fifteenth century.
The considerable loss of a spontaneous rhythmic sense after the Middle
Ages is evidence of increased domestication, just as two basic
Renaissance characteristics, specialization of and within the orchestra
and the formation of a class of narrowly focused virtuosi, also bespoke
a greater division of labor at large. Similarly, new emphasis had been
placed on the spectator, and by the late 1500s, music involving no
spectacle other than that of men at work, not intended for provoking
movement or for singing but made only for being passively consumed,
first appeared.
Renaissance music remained for the most part and most importantly vocal,
but during this period instrumental music became independent and first
developed a number of autonomous forms known collectively as “absolute
music.” More and more secularized as well, European music under the
unquestioned leadership of the Netherlands between 1400 and 1600 took on
a mathematicized aspect quite compatible with the Dutch ascendancy
within the rise of early mercantile capitalism. The power of sound
achieved an intoxication born of the choral mass effects that are made
possible when the many, formerly independent voices of a composition
join into one body of harmony.
But a tonal harmonics present in some places was not yet a tonality
present throughout. The modal scales, sufficient from the early Middle
Ages to the latter part of the sixteenth century, expanded from eight to
twelve modes and then began to break down and yield to two less fluid
modes, major/minor scale binarism. “The restlessness and disenchantment
of the late Renaissance,” in Edward Lowinsky’s words, called forth the
coherence and unity of tonic-dominant structure as music’s contribution
to class society’s cultural hegemony. Our modern harmonic sense, the
conception of tone as the sum of many vertically grouped tones, is an
idealization of hierarchized social harmony.
Peter Clark’s The European Crisis of the 1590s quotes a Spanish writer
of 1592: “England without God, Germany in schism, Flanders in rebellion,
France with all these together.” As the century drew to a close,
surveyed Henry Karmen, “Probably never before in European history had so
many popular uprisings coincided in time.” Tonality was not yet
victorious but would, fairly soon, come to reign among the dominant
ideas of society, playing its part to channel and thereby pacify desire.
As polyphony faded, the modern key system began to emerge more
distinctly in a new form in the opening years of the 1600s; namely,
opera, first brought forth in Italy by Monteverdi. The conscious
rhetorical presentation of emotion, it was the first secular musical
structure in the West conceived on a scale sufficiently grand to rival
that of religious music. With opera and elsewhere, the early phases of
“the developing feeling for tonality,” according to H.C. Colles,
“already gave the new works an appearance of orderliness and stability
which marked the inauguration of a new era in art.”
The growing concern for a central tonality in the seventeenth century
thrived on Descartes. With his mathematized, mechanistic rationalism and
his specific attention to musical structure, Descartes advanced the new
tonal system in the same spirit as he consciously put his scientific
philosophy in the service of strong central government. To Adorno,
polyphonic music contained nonreified, autonomous elements which made it
perhaps best suited to express the ‘otherness’ Cartesian consciousness
was designed to eliminate.
The background to this development was a marked renewal of the social
strife of the very late 1500s. Hobsbawm found in the 1600s the crisis
par excellence; Parker and Smith (The General Crisis of the Seventeenth
Century) saw this “explosion of political instability” in Europe as
“directed overwhelmingly against the State, particularly during the
period 1625–1675.” The previous century had been largely the golden age
of counterpoint, reaching its apogee with Palestrina and Lassus, its
ideal a static social harmony to be imitated in music. The Baroque
aesthetic corresponded to the crises beginning in the 1590s, and
resuming in earnest with the general economic breakdown of 1620; it’s
nothing if not a rejection of classical calm and its polyphonic
refinements. The essence of Baroque is to move with the turbulence so as
to control it; hence it combines restless movement with formalism. Here
the concerto comes of age, linked by more than etymology to consent,
consensus. Derived from the Latin concertare, agreement reached with
dissonant elements, it reflected, as a well-harmonized ensemble, the
great demand of the system for authority equal to the social struggles.
Harmony is homophony not polyphony; polyphony and harmony are in
themselves irreconcilable. Instead of a form in which many voices are
combined so that each retains its own character, with harmony we really
hear only one tone. In the Baroque age of conflict homophony overtakes
and supplants polyphony, with obvious ideological ‘overtones’.
Independent sounds merge to form a united block, whose function is
background for the melody and also to register the tune in motion in its
place within the tonal system. At this time harmony first established
itself as essential to music, even changing the nature of melody in the
process. Rhythm too was affected by harmony; indeed the division of
music into bars was dictated by the new, ever-present harmonic rhythm.
Spengler judged that music overtook painting as the chief European art
at about 1670. It prevailed at the very time when tonality was
definitively realized; music was henceforth to be written in the idiom
of fully established tonality, without challenge, for about two and a
half centuries. The externalization of immediate subjective interests
according to tonality’s generalizing code corresponds, from this time as
weil, to the legal conception of the “reasonable man,” Dunwell informs
us, though one is tempted to rephrase it as “modern, domesticated,”
rather than “reasonable.”
There are other striking temporal coincidences. John Wolf’s The
Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685–1715, among other historical
studies, sets the moment of ascendant state power as paralleling that of
central tonality. And as Bukhofzer wrote, “Both tonality and gravitation
were discoveries of the baroque period made at exactly the same time.”
The significance of Newtonian physics is that universal gravitation
offered a model emphasizing immutable law and resistance to change; its
universally prevailing, ordered motions provided a unified cosmological
exemplar for political and economic order — as did tonality. In the new
harmonic system the principal tone, the one strongest and most dominant,
gravitates downward and through, and becomes the bass, the fundamental
tone of the chord; the laws of tonality can be read almost
interchangeably, incredible as it may sound, with those of gravitation.
Mid to late seventeenth century England exemplified more general social
trends in music. The critics North and Mace wrote of the decline of the
amateur viol player, and the tendency in composition wherein “Part
writing gave way to fireworks and pattern making,” to cite Peter
Warlock. Family chamber music decreased; the habit of passive listening
increased, against the breakup of village communalism with its songs and
dances. Victorious tonality was a very important part of a major social
and symbolic restructuring, and certainly not just in England.
Beginning in the Baroque era, the main vehicle of tonality was the
sonata (i.e. ‘played’ as opposed to the earlier, single movement canzona
or ‘sung’), which came to cover virtually any instrumental,
multimovement composition that proceeds according to a formal plan. The
sonata form was an organic outgrowth of harmonic tonality in that its
symmetrics were basically related to the internal symmetrical
organization of the grammar of tonality; its fundamental structure
requires that music which appears first as a move away from the tonic
toward a newly polarized key be reinterpreted finally with the original
tonic area in order to restore the balance. Even the challenging finales
of Mozart’s operas, Rosen reminds us, have the symmetrical tonal
structure of a sonata. By the end of the Baroque in the late eighteenth
century, symmetry withheld and then finally granted had become one of
music’s cardinal satisfactions.
With its conflict of two themes, its keynote, development and reprise,
the sonata form presupposes a capitalist dynamics; the
equilibrium-oriented and totally undramatic fugue, high water mark of an
earlier counterpoint, reflected a more static hierarchical society.
Fugal style was fulfilled just as tonality came to complete predominance
and its movement is largely one of sequence. A classical sonata, on the
other hand, is self-generating, moving forward as a revelation of its
initially unseen inner potential. The fugue goes on obeying its initial
law, like a calculation, as befits rationalist Enlightenment, whereas
sonata themes exhibit a dynamic condition announcing the qualitative
leap in domination of nature inaugurated by industrial capitalism.
In the early 17^(th) century Rubens’ studio became a factory; his output
of over 1200 paintings was unprecedented in the history of art. One
hundred fifty years later’ utilizing the preordained sonata form, Haydn
and Mozart could turn out 150 symphonies between them. Perhaps it is not
suggesting too much, or denying the genius of some creators, to see in
this mechanism a cultural prefiguring of mass production. A further
characteristic is that sonata music, unlike the complicated late fugal
style, had to be predictable, pleasing. Reminding one of tonality
itself, “The sonata cycle affirms the happy ending, lends itself to
reconciliation, to salvation from first and second movement strivings,
torments, inner doubts” before it concludes, in the words of Robert
Solomon.
The sonata-form principle also involves the idea of gradually increasing
activity, a cumulative dynamism that reaches out to exclude specificity,
to dominate via generalization. It is for this effect that it embodies
the crowning achievement of the emergence of generalizing forms in
bourgeois evolution and so well expresses the drive toward ‘universal’
values and world hegemony of European culture and capital.
In the eighteenth century the modern notion of music’s autonomy began to
form, with the claim (persisting today) to transcendental truth that
attaches to Bach and Mozart especially. The proud solemnity of Handel’s
oratorios speaks of the rise of imperialist England and a desire to
lezitimate that rise, but Bach in particular most effectively
articulated the social values of the emerging bourgeoisie as universal
rationality, objectivity, truth.
The precursors of Bach had made evident a structuration proper to
tonality, but it was he who brought that structuration to a precise
perfection, combining the drama and goal orientation of the late Baroque
with aspects of the earlier, soberer contrapuntal ideal. It is worth
noting that the older, more statically mathematized forms survive in the
eighteenth century, though they do not reign; this survival accounts for
those sequential developments which Constant Lambert disrespectfully
speaks of as the Bach “sewing machine,” just as Wagner referred to
Mozart as possessed of “sometimes an almost trivial regularity”
But if Bach represents the virtual apotheosis of harmonically based
tonality there were some doubts expressed regarding this whole thrust.
Rousseau for example, saw harmony as only another symptom of Europe’s
cultural decay indeed as the death of music. He based this extreme view
on harmony’s depreciation of melody its delimitation of the perception
of musical sounds to the internal structuring of its elements and hence
its truncation of the listener’s experience. Goethe too had misgivings
in terms of the artificiality and reification of fully developed
tonality, but they were less clearly stated than Rousseau´s.
By about 1800, tonal instrumental music reached the full command of its
powers, a point that painting had arrived at almost three hundred years
earlier. The greatest change in eighteenth century tonality in part
influenced by the establishment of equal temperament (the division of
the octave into twelve precisely equal semitones) was an even more
emphatic polarity between tonic and dominant and an enlargement of the
range over which the key modulation obtains. At the beginning of the
century the key relationship could already hold up over periods of eight
or more bars without being sounded again, whereas Mozart, Haydn and
Beethoven had, by the end of the century, extended the authority of
harmonic relations to five or even ten minutes.
The widening of the tonal orbit, however, meant a consequent weakening
in the gravitational pull of the tonic; with Beethoven, in the early
Romantic era, some undermining of structural tonality can already be
seen. What is new thematically in Beethoven is a climax of emotional
expression as well as a greater range of emotions expressed, plus the
centrality of the motif of the struggle for individual freedom,
precisely as the defeat of the Luddites in England presaged the
suppression of emotional expressivity and individual freedom in society
at large. Much unlike say, Bach, he began from the fact of alienation
and ultimately refused to reconcile in his music that which is
unreconciled in society; this can be seen most clearly in his last
quartets, which recall the incompleteness and anguish of the late music
of Mozart.
The Romantic art par excellence, music came to be thought of as a
uniquely privileged medium. Indeed, it was in the Beethovenian period,
or shortly thereafter, that the composer was ceded the status of
philosopher, contrasting sharply with the role of virtual servant that
Haydn and Mozart had occupied. Perhaps the so-called “redemptive force”
of music, to cross over to the social terrain, was nowhere more in
evidence than with a performance of Auber’s opera, La Muette de Portici,
which provoked the out break of revolution in Brussels in 1830. Later in
the century, Walter Pater’s assessment that “All art constantly aspires
towards the condition of music” bespoke not only music as the
culmination of the arts but reflected its forcefulness at the height of
tonality. It is also in this latter sense, as appreciation of tonality,
that Schopenhauer celebrated music in a way unrivaled in philosophical
writing, as more powerful than words and the direct expression of inner
consciousness. Adorno spoke of the “bursting longing of Romanticism” and
Marothy discussed its frequented themes of loneliness and nostalgia, the
effort to capture the sense of something that is irretrievably lost.
Along these lines, the drama of rescue was not only the literary fashion
of the day but is often found in music, such as Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Schubert could ask whether there was such a thing as joyous music, as if
in response to an industrializing Europe, and was answered by the
elegiac, resigned Brahms and the pessimist Mahler in the later Romantic
era.
Harmony was the special realm of the period; orchestral groupings
favored the massed and unified deployment of each instrumental family to
stretch and intensify the central concern with pitch relationships to
convey meaning, over the other aspects of music. It was the age of great
orchestral forces designed to exploit the compulsive powers of tone,
proceeding via the coordination of diverse specialist function. In this
manner, and with an increasingly systematic conception of musical
structure, Romantic music paralleled the perfection of industrial
method. As the nineteenth century progressed, a growing number of
composers felt that musical language was becoming trapped under the
syntactical and formal constraints of tonality, an overly standardized
harmonic vocabulary bound to empty symmetrical regularities. Flattening
out under the weight of its own habits, music seemed to be losing its
former expressive power.
Like capital, then at the height of its initial expansiveness, the
modern orchestra pursued the illusion of indefinite growth. But Romantic
overstatement and giganticism (i.e. Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand)
were used, more often than not, to create a limited range of homogenized
sounds, a uniformity of timbre.
To speak of expansion calls to mind Wagner’s attempt at a simple,
economical repertoire opera — the resultant work was the five-hour,
gorgeous agony of Tristan and Isolde. Or Wagner’s Ring series, based on
the Nibelungen myth, that epic of perpetual lust and death by which he
desired to outdo all conceivable spectacles, and which most likely
prompted Nietzsche to judge, “There is a deep significance in the fact
that the rise of Wagner coincides with the rise of empire.” An operatic
portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm I beside a swan and wearing a Lohengrin
helmet suggests the debt owed him for celebrating and reconsecrating the
social order of the second German Reich. If Tristan was the prelude to
the political development of Bismarckian Germany, the latter found its
authoritarian and mystical justification in Parsifal’s pseudo-erotic
religiosity.
Wagner intended a merger of all the arts into a higher form of opera and
in this project it seemed to him that he had superseded dogmatic
religion. Such an aim projected the complete domination of the spectator
by mean’s of the grandeur and pomposity of his musical productions,
their perfumed sultriness and bombardment of the senses. His boast was
no less than that, owing to his neopagan, neonationalist achievement,
“Church and state will be abolished,” having outlived their usefulness.
Thus his aims for art were more grandiose than those of industrial
capitalism itself and spoke its language of power.
And yet Wagner also, and more importantly, represents the full decay of
the classic harmonic system. Despite all the bombast and striving for a
maximum of authority, his is the music of doubt. His music remained
faithful to at least a latent foundation of tonality but, especially
with Tristan, the enduring validity of tonal harmony was already
disproved. Wagner had extended it to its ultimate limits and exhausted
its last resources.
Part of Mahler’s Song of the Earth is marked “without expression.” It
seems that romanticism after Wagner was turning to ashes, though at the
same time something new was being foreshadowed. Harmony continued to
show signs of collapse from within and increasing liberties were taken
with the previously unlimited sovereignty of the major/minor tonal
system (e.g. Debussy). Meanwhile, as capital required more “Third World”
resources for its stability, music too turned imperialist in the sense
of much needed folk transfusions (e.g. Bartok).
In 1908 Arnold Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in F Sharp Minor attained the
decisive break with harmonic development: it was the first atonal
composition. Fittingly, the movement in question is begun by the soprano
with the words: “Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten” (“I feel air from
other planets”).
Adorno saw the radical openness of atonal music as an “expression of
unmitigated suffering, bound by no convention whatsoever” and as such
“often hostile to culture” and “containing elements of barbarism.” The
rejection of tonality indeed enabled expression of the most intense
subjectivity, the loneliness of the subject under technological
domination. Nonetheless, the equivalences by which human emotion is
universalized and objectified are still present, if released from the
centralized control of the “laws of harmony”. Schoenberg’s “emancipation
of the dissonance” allowed for the presentation of human passions with
unprecedented immediacy via dissonant harmonies that have little or no
tendency to resolve. The avoidance of tonal suggestion and resolution
provides the listener with precious little support or security:
Schoenberg’s atonal work often seems almost hysterically emotional due
to the absence of points of real repose. “It is driven frantically
toward the unattainable,” noted Leonard Meyer.
In this sense, atonality proved to be the most extreme manifestation of
the general anti-authoritarian upheaval in society of the five or so
years preceding World War I Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality
coincides with the abandonment of perspective in painting by Picasso and
Kandinsky (in 1908). But with these “two great negative gestures” in
culture, as they have been termed, it was the composer who found himself
propelled into a public void. In his steadfast affirmation of
alienation, his unwillingness to present any scene of human realization
that was not feral, difficult, wild, Schoenberg’s atonality was too much
of a threat and challenge to find much acceptance. The expressionist
painter August Macke wrote to his colleague Franz Marc following an
evening of Schoenberg’s chamber music in 1911: “Can you imagine music in
which tonality has been completely abandoned? I was reminded constantly
of Kandinsky’s large compositions which are written, as it were, in no
single key...this music which lets every tone stand by itself.”
Unfortunately, their feeling for such a radically libertarian approach
was not shared by many, not exposed to many.
As Macke’s letter implies, before the atonal breakout, music had
achieved meaning through the defined relations of chords to a tonal
center. Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony summed up the old system well:
“It has always been the referring of all results to a center, to an
emanating point... Tonality does not serve: on the contrary it demands
to be served.”
Some defenders of tonality, on the other hand, have adopted a frankly
socially authoritarian point of view, feeling that more than just
changes in music were at stake. Levarie and Levy’s Musical Morphology
(1983), for example, proceeded from the philosophical thesis that “Chaos
is nonbeing” to the political stance that “The revolt against
tonality... is an egalitarian revolution.” They further pronounced
atonality to be “a general contemporary phenomenon,” noting with
displeasure how “Obsessive fear of tonality reveals a deep aversion to
the concept of hierarchy and rank.” This stance is reminiscent of
Hindemith’s conclusion that it is impossible to deny the validity of
hierarchical tone relationships and that there is therefore “no such
thing as atonal music.” Such comments obviously seek to defend more than
the dominant musical form: they would preserve authority,
standardization, hierarchy and whatever cultural grammar guarantees a
world defined by such values.
Schoenberg’s atonal experiment suffered as part of the defeat that World
War I and its aftermath meted out for social dissonance. By the early
1920s he had given up the systemless radicalism of atonality. not a
single ‘free’ note survived. In the absence of a tonal center he
inserted the totally rule-governed 32-tone set, which, as Adorno judged,
“virtually extinguishes the subject.” Dodecaphony, or serialism as it is
also called, constituted a new compliance in the place of tonality,
corresponding to a new phase of increasingly systematized industrialism
introduced with World War I. Schoenberg forged new laws to control what
was liberated by the destruction of the old tonal rules of resolution,
new laws that guarantee a more complete circulation among all twelve
pitches and may be said to speak to capital’s growing need for improved
recirculation. Serial technique is a kind of total integration in which
movement is strictly controlled, as in a bureaucratically enforced mode.
Its conceptual drawback for the dominant order is that while greater
circulation is achieved via its new standardized demands (none of the
tones is to be repeated before the other eleven have been heard), the
concentrated control actually allows for very little production. This is
seen most clearly in the extreme understatement and brevity in much of
the work of Webern, Schoenberg’s most successful disciple; at times
there are as many pauses as notes, while the second of Webern’s early
Three Pieces for Cello and Piano, for example, lasts only thirteen
seconds.
The old harmonic system and its major/minor key points of reference
provided easily understood places of departure and destination.
Serialism accords equal use to each note, making any chord feasible:
this conveys a somewhat homeless, fragmentary sense, suitable to an age
of more diffuse, traditionless domination.
As of World War 1, art music in general began to fragment. Stravinsky
led the neoclassicist tendency, which reaffirmed a tonal center despite
the prevailing winds of change. Grounded firmly in the 18^(th) century,
it seemed to increasing numbers of composers, especially after World War
1l, to be no solution to music’s theoretical problems. Serialist figure
Pierre Boulez termed its rather flagrantly anachronistic character and
refusal of development a ‘mockery’. Neoclassical music seemed to share
at least something with the new serialist movement, however, an often
stark, austere character, in line with the general trend toward
contraction and pessimism. Benjamin Britten seemed preoccupied with the
problem of suffering, while many of Aaron Copland’s works evoke the
loneliness of industrial cities, whose very energy is bereft of real
vitality. Another major traditionalist, Vaughan Williams, ended his
masterful Sixth Symphony with what can only be described as an objective
statement of utter nihilism.
Meanwhile, by the 1950s, serialism came to be regarded as
overdetermined, its discipline too severe, so much so that it occasioned
‘chance’ music (also called aleatory music or indeterminacy). Closely
identified popularly with John Cage, chance seemed another part of the
larger swing away from the subject — which electronic or
computer-generated composition would take even further — whereby the
human voice disappears and even the performer is often eliminated.
Paradoxically, the aesthetic effects produced by random methods are the
same as those realized by totally ordered music. The minimalism of
Reich, Glass and others seems a mass-marketed neoconservatism in its
pleasant, repetitious poverty of ideas. Iannis Xenakis, imitating the
brutalism of his teacher Le Corbusier, may be said to stand for the
height of the cybernetizing, computer-worshipping approach: he has
sought an “alloy of music and technology” based on his research into
“logico-mathematical invariants.”
Art music is today bewildered by a scattering influence, the absence of
any unifying, common-practice language. And yet the main thrust of all
of it — if one can use the word thrust in such an enervated context — is
a cold expressionlessness wholly befitting the enormous increase in
alienation, objectification and reification of worldwide late
capitalism. A divided society must finally make do with a divided art:
the landscape does not ‘harmonize’. It is an era that perhaps cannot
even be given a musical ending any more; it has certainly become both
too unruly and too bleak to be composed and brought to any tonal,
cadenced close. When art and even symbolization itself seem false to
many, the question occurs, where do the forces lie by which music can be
kept alive, where is the enchantment?
“All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts
themselves,” wrote Spengler. Art — with music in the forefront — may, as
Hegel speculated it would, be already well within the age of its demise.
Samuel Lipman’s Music after Modernism (1979) pronounced music’s terminal
illness, its status as “living on the capital of the explosion of
creativity which lasted from before Bach to World War I.” The failure of
tonality’s ‘creativity’ is of course part of an overall entropy in which
capital, in Lipman’s accidental accuracy of words, turns toxic and
unmistakably self-destructive. Adorno saw that “There are fewer and
fewer works from the past that continue to be any good. It is as if the
entire supply of culture is dwindling.” Some would merely hold on to the
museum pieces of tonality at all costs and deplore the lack of their
resupply. This is the meaning of virtually all the standard laments on
the subject, such as Constant Lambert’s Music Ho! A Study of Music in
Decline (1934) or The Agony of Modern Music (1955) in which Henry
Pleasants told us that “The vein which for three hundred years offered a
seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out,” or Roland
Stromberg in After Everything (1975): “It is hard ...not to think that
serious music has reached the state of total decay.” But the same death
verdict also comes from non-antiquarians: a 1983 lecture by noted
serialist composer Milton Babbitt was called “The Unlikely Survival of
Serious Music.” Earlier, Babbitt, in the face of the unpopularity of
contemporary art music posed, defiantly and unrealistically, the
“complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical
composition” and penned an article entitled “Who Cares If You Listen?”
The lack of a public for ‘difficult’ music is obvious and noteworthy. If
Bloch was correct to judge “All we hear is ourselves,” it may also be
correct to conclude that the listener does not want that element in
music that is a confrontation with our age. Adorno referred to
Schoenberg’s music as the reflection of a broken and empty world,
evoking a reply from Milan Rankovic that “Such a reflection cannot be
loved because it reproduces the same emptiness in the spirit of the
listener.” A further question, relating to the limits of art itself, is
whether estrangement in music could ever prove effective in the struggle
against the estrangement of society.
Modern music, however splintered and removed from the old tonal
paradigm, has obviously not effaced the popularity of the Baroque,
Classical and Romantic masters. And in the area of music education
tonality continues to prevail at all levels; undergraduates in
composition classes are instructed that the dominant ‘demands’
resolution, that it “must resolve” to the tonic, etc., and the students’
musical sense itself is appraised in terms of the once-unchallenged
harmonic categories and rules. Tonality, as should be clear by now, is
an ideology in purely musical terms, and one that perseveres.
One wonders, in fact, why art music, where traditions are revered,
should have made the break that it has, while all of pop music (and
almost all jazz, which inherited its harmonic system from classic
European tonality), where traditions are often despised, has held back.
There is no form of popular music in the industrial world that exists
outside the province of mass tonal consciousness. As Richard Norton said
so well: “It is the tonality of the church, school, office, parade,
convention, cafeteria, workplace, airport, airplane, automobile, truck,
tractor, lounge, lobby, bar, gym, brothel, bank, and elevator. Afraid of
being without it on foot, humans are presently strapping it to their
bodies in order to walk to it, run to it, work to it, and relax to it.
It is everywhere. It is music and it writes the songs.”
It is also as totally integrated into commercialized mass production as
any product of the assembly line. The music never changes from the
seemingly eternal formula, despite superficial variations; the ‘good’
song, the harmonically marketable song, is one that contains fewer
different chords than a 14^(th) century ballad. Its expressive potential
exists solely within the limited confines of consumer choice, wherein,
according to Horkheimer and Adorno, “Something is provided for everyone
so that none shall escape.” As a one-dimensional code of consumer
society, it is a training course in passivity.
Music, reduced to background noise which no longer takes itself
seriously, is at the same time a central, omnipresent element of
environment, more so than ever before. The immersion in tonality is at
once distraction and pervasive control, as the silence of isolation and
boredom must be filled in. It comforts us, denying that the world is as
reified as it is, reduced to making believe that — as Beckett put it in
Endgame — anything is happening, that anything changes. Pop music also
provides a pleasure of identification, the immediate experience of
collective identity that only massified culture, unconscious of the
authoritarian ideology which is tonality, can provide.
Rock music was a ‘revolution’ compared with earlier pop music only in
the sense of lyrics and tempo (and volume) — no tonal revolution had
even been dimly conceived. Studies have shown that all types of (tonal)
music calm the unruly. consider how punk has standardized and clichéd
the musical sneer. It is not only the music of overt pacification, like
New Age composition, which denies the negative as dangerous and evil in
the same way that Socialist Realism did, and likewise aids and abets the
daily oppression. Just as surely it will take more than rockers smashing
their guitars on stage, even though the limits of tonality may be behind
such acts, to signal a new age.
Like language, tonality is historically characterized by its unfreedom.
We are made tonal by society: only in the elimination of that society
will occur the superseding of all grammars of domination.