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DEN 18 JUNI 2013

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The Post-Modern Ear

By Roger Scruton

Towards the end of the 19th century, and in the wake of Wagner's achievement in Tristan und Isolde
and Parsifal, the musical language which had been common property of Western composers since the
Renaissance, underwent a crisis.
What we now know as tonality, which is the system of keys and scales, and the harmonic progressions, which
had been accepted by audiences since at least the end of the Middle Ages, entered a kind of flux. Keys were
no longer stable; dissonances began to resolve onto other dissonances (as in the Prelude to Tristan und
Isolde), new harmonies began to insert themselves into the old sequences, and the scale expanded from eight
notes to the twelve-note chromatic scale, using notes at random from other keys, and constructing sinuous
melodic lines that seemed more adapted to dark and solitary emotions than to the cheerful day-light
exuberance of choral song.
The crisis deepened during the first quarter of the 20th century, as a result of two striking innovations. The first
was that of Debussy, anticipated by Liszt, who began to use the whole-tone scale (the scale without
semitones). This scale, emphasizing each note equally, and being without a dominant, is directionless and lacks
the dynamic tension of the traditional major and minor modalities. From the whole-tone scale new harmonies
emerge static, indolent, yet somehow not at rest. Debussy combined this scale with post-Wagnerian
harmonies, in music which was guided entirely by his own sensitive ear, and by none of the rules of classical
harmony, not even those followed and stretched by Wagner. Ravel followed suit, and in due course the French
composers were to influence Bartk, Stravinsky and Jancek, all of whom borrowed the whole-tone language
when they needed it, meanwhile inventing with the ear.
The second innovation, yet more subversive, was the introduction of entirely atonal melodies and harmonies by
Schoenberg, who also, in his vocal setting Pierrot Lunaire, used Sprachgesang a kind of insinuating
sing-song, in which words are deftly stuck onto the musical line, rather than being sung to a melody of their
own. It was impossible to dismiss Schoenbergs innovations as the work of a second-rate composer trying to
disguise his incompetence. In Gurrelieder, Verklrte Nacht, and Pellas et Mlisande he had shown total
mastery of tonality and of late romantic harmony, and these great works remain part of the repertoire today.
But by the time of the Piano Pieces op. 11 he was writing music which to many people no longer made sense,
with melodic lines that began and ended nowhere, and harmonies that seemed to bear no relation to the
principal voice. At the same time, Schoenbergs atonal pieces were meticulously composed, according to
schemes that involved the intricate relation of phrases and thematic ideas.
In due course this meticulousness led to an obsession with structure and the quasi-mathematical idiom of
twelve-tone serialism, in which the linear relations of tonal music were entirely replaced by a permutational
grammar. The result, in the hands of a musical genius like Schoenberg, was intriguing, often (as in the
unfinished opera Moses und Aron, and The Survivor from Warsaw) genuinely moving. Schoenbergs pupils
Alban Berg and Anton Webern developed the idiom, the one in a romantic and quasi-tonal direction, the other
towards a refined pointillistic style that is uniquely evocative. But it should be remembered that all these
experiments were begun at a time when Mahler was composing tonal symphonies, with great arched melodies
in the high romantic tradition, and using modernist harmonies only as rhetorical gestures within a strongly
diatonic style. And in England Vaughan Williams and Holst were working in a similar way, treating dissonances
as by-ways within an all-including tonal logic.
A concert-goer in the early 1930s would have been faced with two completely different musics one (Vaughan
Williams, Holst, Sibelius, Walton, Strauss, Busoni) remaining within the bounds of the tonal language, the other
(Schoenberg and his school) consciously departing from the old language, and often striking a deliberately

Axess Magasin
r en tidskrift inom omrdet
humaniora/samhllsvetenskap och utges av
Axess Publishing AB. Tidskriftens
mlsttning r att fungera som en knutpunkt
mellan den akademiska och den publicistiska
sfren.
Tf. Chefredaktr: Peter Elmlund
Redaktrer: David Andersson, Mats
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Redaktionsrd: Niklas Ekdal, Thomas Gr,
Peter Luthersson, Nathan Shachar, Isabella
Thomas
Fr att kontakta redaktionen, mejla
redaktionen@axess.se.

Axess beklagar
I nr 9 2011 av Axess Magasin och p vr
webbsida publicerade vi en artikel med titeln
Ovrdigt spel fr gallerierna av Joakim
Grnesj. I artikeln skriver Joakim Grnej
om sin uppfattning om varfr Moderna
museet i Stockholm valde att stlla ut
konstverk av Cy Twombly tillsammans med
konstverk av Turner och Monet i den nyliga
utstllningen Turner, Monet, Twombly. Sent
mleri som organiserades av Jeremy
Lewison.
Det har kommit till vr knnedom att artikeln
har tolkats som rekrnkande av Jeremy
Lewison. Vi vill betona att svitt vi knner till

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defiant pose towards it. Somewhere in between those two musics hovered the great eclectic geniuses,
Stravinsky, Bartk and Prokoviev. And meanwhile the polemics abounded, some dismissing the tonal idiom as
reactionary and exhausted, some attacking the modernists as nonsensical and deliberately insulting to the good
bourgeois audiences who paid for their self-indulgence.
As we know the contest between tonality and atonality continued throughout the 20th century. The first was
popular, the second, on the whole, popular only with the elites. But it was the elites who controlled things, and
who directed the state subsidies to the music that they preferred or at least, that they pretended to prefer.
From the time (1959) when the modernist critic Sir William Glock took over the musical direction of BBCs Third
Programme, only the second kind of contemporary music was broadcast over the airwaves in Britain.
Composers like Vaughan Williams were marginalised, and experimental voices given an airing in proportion to
their cacophonousness. During the 1950s there also grew up in Darmstadt a wholly new pedagogy of music,
under the aegis of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Composition, as taught by Stockhausen, consisted in total
randomness of inspiration combined with a meticulous mathematisation of the score, to produce music which
makes little or no sense to the ear, but which fascinates the eye when spelled out on the page.
Stockhausens own works bulbous monstrosities which make maximum demands on the listeners attention
and give next to nothing in return received and still receive extensive, usually state-subsidised performances
all across the world. His older Austrian contemporary, Gottfried von Einem, who was at the time writing
powerful operas in a tonal idiom influenced by Stravinsky and Prokoviev, was in comparison ignored, not
because his music is trivial, but because he was perceived to be out of touch with a musical culture determined
to clear away the dangerous vestiges of the romantic worldview.
It is no longer accepted as proof of a low-brow musical sensibility to wish to reconnect with that the romantic
tradition. It is now permissible to like Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, and to believe that they are superior to
Stockhausen and Boulez. It is permissible to reject the notion that tonality was made irrelevant by the atonal
school, and to recognise that some of the greatest works in the tonal tradition were composed in the middle of
the 20th century: Rachmaninovs Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for example, Strausss Four Last Songs,
Brittens War Requiem, the later symphonies of Shostakovitch and Vaughan Williams, Aaron Coplands Clarinet
Concerto and Appalachian Spring. Some of these the Rachmaninov and the Strauss could be seen as
extracting unexploited remainders from the tonal tradition. Others Britten (and not in this work only) and
Copland could be seen as actively engaged in renewing the tonal tradition, drawing out new kinds of melodic
line and novel harmonic sequences.
The idea put about by the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, that tonality was by then nothing but the exhausted
remainder of a dead tradition, was definitely disproven by post-war music. By the 1950s it was atonality and
not tonality that was exhausted. The radical modernist idiom was kept alive by Darmstadt and the musical
establishment, by the system of official patronage and by the fact that real musical education, which used to be
a household requirement, had been effectively destroyed by the invention of broadcasting and recording.
Without a musical education it is not easy to feel confident in saying, of Stockhausen, that the Enperor has no
clothes.
Meanwhile the real modernist experiments those which drew freely on the tonal tradition and on the eclectic
spirit of Western civilisation gained acceptance from the ordinary concert-goer. Works like the Turangalila
Symphony of Messiaen, the remarkable Star-Child oratorio by George Crumb, and the triple concerto of
Michael Tippett entered the repertoire without any need for the critical hype and institutional support enjoyed by
Stockhausen and Boulez.
But there is another reason for the brief ascendancy of radical modernism, and one that bears heavily on the
future of Western music. During the course of the 20th century a wholly new kind of popular music emerged.
Nobody can say, in retrospect, that the waltzes and polkas of Strauss or the operettas of Lhar and Offenbach
belong to another language and another culture from the symphonies of Brahms or the music dramas of
Wagner. Strauss (father and son), Lhar, Offenbach are now counted in the classical repertoire, just as much
as Wagner, Brahms and the other Strauss. And the distinction between popular entertainment and high art is
internal to their repertoire: the Overture to Der Fledermaus and the Hungarian Dances of Brahms surely stand
side by side.
Only in the 20th century did popular and serious music finally divide, and the principal reason for this was jazz
itself an intrusion into Western culture from a place outside it. The origin of this remarkable idiom is veiled in
obscurity, though it is evident that it absorbed, along the way, both the syncopated rhythms of African drum
music, the blues notes that come from attempting to unite the pentatonic and the diatonic scales, and the chord
grammar of the Negro spirituals. The jazz idiom showed a remarkable ability to develop, so that an entirely new
harmonic language grew from it, and soon became the foundation of a new kind of popular song and dance. It
was this quintessentially American idiom that most got up the nose of Adorno, and which served as his proof
that tonality was destined to degenerate into short-breathed melodies and repetitious sequences. For that was
all that Adorno found in the jazz of his day.
It is true that improvisation around a jazz standard is a very different thing from the far-ranged musical thinking
that we find in the concert-hall. A work that returns constantly to the same source for refreshment, and goes on
forever precisely because it goes on only for a moment is a very different thing from the symphony which
develops thematic material, extracting a continuous musical narrative. But Ravel, Gershwin and Stravinsky
showed how to incorporate jazz melodic lines and even jazz harmonic sequences into symphonic works that had
some of the long-distance complexity of the classical tradition. Meanwhile there emerged a new form of popular
music, on the edge of jazz, but reaching into the world of folk melody and light opera. This was the idiom of the
Broadway Musical and the American Song Book. Brilliant musicians like Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and
Richard Rodgers became household names, with songs that our parents knew by heart, and which defined a
new kind of taste.

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This was music to be sung around the house, which normalised the emotions of ordinary people as they
endeavoured to cope with the new world of machines, gadgets, social mobility, fast romance and easy divorce.
Thus began the great fracture in the world of music between pop and classical, in which it became ever more
important for the critics to side with the classical tradition, and to find something that distinguished modern
composers in that tradition from the easy listening and light music that filled the suburban bathroom.
For a while, therefore, there was an added motive for composers to take the path of radical modernism, and
so to give proof that they belonged to the great tradition of serious musical thinking. A composer like Boulez or
Fernyhough, ensconed in the madhouse of IRCAM in Paris, could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself
king of infinite space, as Hamlet put it. Insulated from the vulgar world of musical enjoyment, sending out
musical spells into the electronic ether, the composer began to live in a world of his own.
That it should be Boulez who received the accolades and not Maurice Durufl or Henri Dutilleux is explained by
the enormous publicity value of difficulty, when difficulty is subsidised by the state. The modernists had
succeeded in persuading the official bodies that they were keeping alive the flame of high art amid the
grotesqueries of an increasingly degenerate pop culture. And for a while, following the transformation of rhythm
and blues into a universal idiom of song and dance by Chuck Berry, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, it
seemed as though they were right. What did this new popular music have to do even with the comparatively
refined language and domestic charm of the Broadway musical, still less with the symphonic and operative
traditions?
But then the whole thing collapsed. Impassable divides have an ability to survive in the old hierachical culture of
Europe; but they dont last for long in America. Composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass had no desire to
separate from their hippy friends, or to lose the one benefit that makes the life of a composer worthwhile,
namely an audience. There emerged the new idiom of minimalism, in which the harmonic complexities of the
modernists and those of the great jazz musicians like Monk, Tatum and Peterson were both rejected in favour
of simple tonal triads, often repeated ad nauseam on mesmeric instruments like the marimbas.
The result, to my ear utterly empty and the best argument for Boulez that I have yet encountered, succeeded in
entering the repertoire and gaining a young and enthusiastic audience. The explanation is simple. This music
uses the devices of pop: regular and mechanical rhythm, fragmented and constantly repeated melodic lines,
and a small repertoirs of chords constantly repeated. It has in effect joined the world of easy listening.
Whether Reich and Glass entitle us to talk of a new and postmodern idiom in the world of serious music I
doubt. For this is not serious music, but a kind of musical void. Listening to Glasss opera Ekhnaton, for
instance, you will be tempted to agree with Adorno, that the musical idiom (lets not speak of the drama) is
utterly exhausted. But then along came John Adams, whose mastery of orchestration and knowledge of real
tonal harmony began to redeem the minimalist idiom, and to bring it properly into the concert hall. And other
American composers followed suit Torke, Del Tredici, Corigliano writing tonal music with attitude, inserting
advanced harmonic episodes into structures that make thematic and rhythmical sense. In Britain a new wave of
tonal composers has also emerged, some of them like James Macmillan, Oliver Knussen and David
Matthews beginning as radical modernists but all moving along the path mapped out by the great Benjamin
Britten, the path out of the sterile desert where no melody ever grows, into a place of song and dance.
Such composers learned the lesson taught (however clumsily) by Reich and Glass, which is that music is
nothing without an audience, and that the audience must be discovered among young people whose ears have
been muddled by the ostinato rhythms and empty chord sequences of pop. To offer serious music to such an
audience you must also attract their attention. And this cannot be done without melody and rhythm that connect
with their own bodily perceptions.
Is it working? I dont know. The catastrophic effect of modern pop think of youjr own Death Metal Group
Meshuggah, or the obscene Lady Gaga is felt not only in the ears but in the soul of its devotees. And it is
difficult to write fresh and tuneful music for a burnt out soul. Still, we have no other path to tread, unless it is the
one that reaches back into that sound-proof bunker beneath the Centre Pompidou, where the spells are still
being brewed and sent with undiminished malice across the airways of Europe.
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