>But, Doug, if you cannot appreciate Schoenberg,
I do, personally. But I spent lots of years studying & listening to the Western musical canon. Now, though, I listen mainly to arty rock & roll.
?why do you jump to the
>conclusion that it has something to do with education?
There may be some people who find a tone row instinctively compelling, but I doubt there are very many. It doesn't necessarily require formal education, but it does require experience and socialization.
>The reasons for the cultural domination of popular music today have their
>origin in the political economy.
True. And some of it is very very good, too, to apply recklessly standards of aesthetic value. But on the oddity of classical music and the origins of the popular kind, it's hard to do better than this passage from Jameson's Adorno essay. I hadn't read in 20 years. Damn, it's good.
Doug
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[from Jameson's Marxism & Form, pp. 12-15]
Yet even the specialized is sometimes taken for granted, even highly sophisticated techniques can come to seem natural in the general indistinction of everyday life. So it turns out that to assess the full originality of Adorno's historical vision, we must try to bring a new unfamiliarity to some of the social phenomena we are accustomed to take for granted: to stare, for instance, with the eyes of a foreigner at the row upon row of people in formal clothing, seated without stirring within their armchairs, each seemingly without contact with his neighbors, yet at the same time strangely divorced from any immediate visual spectacle, the eyes occasionally closed as in powerful concentration, occasionally scanning with idle distraction the distant cornices of the hall itself. For such a spectator it is not at once clear that there is any meaningful relationship between this peculiar behavior and the bewildering tissue of instrumental noises that seems to provide a kind of background for it, like Arab musicians playing behind their curtain. What is taken for granted by us is not apparent to such an outsider, namely that the event around which the concert hall is itself established consists precisely of attention to that stream of sound patterns entering in at the ear, to the organized and meaningful succession of a nonverbal sign-system, as to a kind of purely instrumental speech.
For Western polyphonic music is "unnatural" precisely to the degree to which it has no institutional equivalent in any other culture. Though it has its origins in ritual, though its earliest forms are not essentially distinct from the dance and chant, the pure monody of other cultures, Western music in its most characteristic forms has severed its ties with those primitive musical activities in which the musical substance, still involved in concrete life and social reality, may be said to have remained representational, to have preserved something like a content. There is no longer a mere difference in degree, but rather an absolute one in kind, between the older, functional music and this, which has developed an autonomy of its own, has acquired the status of an event in its own right, and requires its participants to suspend their other activities in the exercise of some alert but nonverbal mental capacity which had never been used before, with the conviction that something real is taking place during fifteen or twenty minutes of practical immobility. It is as if a new sense had been invented (for the active, interpretive concentration which marks such listening is as distinct from ordinary hearing as is mathematical language from ordinary speech), as if a new organ had been developed, a new type of perception formed. What is particularly noteworthy is the poverty of the materials from which such new perception has been fashioned; for the ear is the most archaic of the senses, and instrumental sounds are far more abstract and inexpressive than words or visual symbols. Yet in one of those paradoxical reversals that characterize the dialectical process, it is precisely this primitive, regressive starting point that determines the development of the most complex of the arts.
Finally, we must observe that inasmuch as Western music is not natural but historical, inasmuch as its development depends so intensely upon the history and development of our own culture, it is mortal as well, and has it in it to die as a genuine activity, to vanish when it has served its purpose and when that social need which it once answered has ceased to exist. The fact that the production of so-called classical records has become a big business in the present day should not make us lose sight of the privileged relationship between the golden age of Western music and a Central Europe in which a significant proportion of the collectivity performed music and knew it from the inside, in a qualitatively different fashion from the passive consumers of our own time. In much the same way such a genre as the epistolary novel loses its very reason for being and its social as well as linguistic basis in a period when letter writing is no longer an important everyday activity and an institutionalized form of communication. So also certain types of lyric poetry vanish from cultures in which conversation and verbal expression are colorless and without life, lacking in any capacity for those twin forms of expansion which are eloquence or figuration.
So it is that Western music at the very outset marks itself off from the culture as a whole, reconstitutes itself as a selfcontained and autonomous sphere at distance from the everyday social life of the period and developing, as it were, parallel to it. Not only does music thereby acquire an internal history of its own, but it also begins to duplicate on a smaller scale all the structures and levels of the social and economic macrocosm itself, and displays its own internal dialectic, its own producers and consumers, its own infrastructure.
In it, for instance, as in the larger world of business and industry, we find a tiny history of inventions and machines, what might be called the engineering dimension of musical history: that of the instruments themselves, which stand in the same ambiguous relationship of cause and effect to the development of the works and forms as do their technological equivalents (the steam engine) in the world of history at large (the industrial revolution). They arrive on the scene with a kind of symbolic fitness: "it is not for nothing that the newly soulful tone of the violin counts among the great innovations of the age of Descartes ." Throughout its long ascendancy, indeed, the violin preserves this close identification with the emergence of individual subjectivity on the stage of philosophical thought. It remains a privileged medium for the expression of the emotions and demands of the lyrical subject, and the violin concerto, much like the Bildungsroman, stands as the vehicle for individual lyric heroics, while in other forms the massed orchestral strings conventionally represent the welling up of subjective feeling and of protest against the necessities of the objective universe. By the same token, when composers begin to suppress the singing violin tone and to orchestrate without strings or to transform the stringed instrument into a plucked, almost percussive device (as in the "ugly" pizzicati, the strummings and "weird" falsetto effects of Schoenberg), what happens to the violin is to be taken as a sign of the determination to express what crushes the individual, to pass from the sentimentalization of individual distress to a new, postindividualistic framework.
In a similar way, the rise of the saxophone, in that commercial music which replaces the older folk art of the masses, has symbolic value: for with it vibration, the oscillation back and forth in place, supersedes the soaring of the violin as an embodiment of subjective excitement in the modern age, and a metallic sound, all pipes and valves, yet "sexually ambivalent" to the degree to which it "mediates between brass and woodwinds" ("being materially related to the former, while it remains woodwind in its mode of performance" ), replaces the living warmth of the older instrument, which expressed life, where the newer one merely simulates it.
And if musical forms evolve in response to their public (church and salon music being little by little supplanted by middle-class spectator forms), so also they are influenced by the changing social functions of their performers as well. Wagner, himself a great conductor, for the first time undertakes to compose music in which the role of the virtuoso...