Good or bad? Searching for objectivity in composition.

[Michael Tauben]

Is it possible to be judge a piece of music objectively?

There is a school of thought which says " If I like it it's good, if I dislike it it's bad"

Whereas I believe that a judgement based solely on a subjective response is not a judgment at all, at least not one worth considering.

As a composer, even when writing for 'oneself' as opposed to writing 'applied' music to order, is it not the case that one must strive for objectivity? 

It is my belief that whatever choices one makes in a composition, it is the musical logic, language and unity of any particular piece that should inform those choices. At least to some extent. Anything which appears as arbitrary can only weaken the piece.

 

( This is a topic some of us were discussing in another thread but was deemed 'off topic' so perhaps we can carry on here.)

[Ondib Olmnilnlolm]

Leonard,

I fully support your position.

I'll go further, and will argue on both "objective" and "subjective" grounds that Gustav Mahler may very well be the greatest symphonist in the whole of the Western Tradition, superior even to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner (and superior to Mozart and Haydn, as a symphonist).

I think this can be done on objective grounds by pointing out how Mahler extended virtually every orchestral resource beyond what was used by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Bruckner; and by pointing to the much wider range of emotions, feelings and aspirations that are reflected in his work.  Yes, even childish tantrums and emotional outbursts are present in his works, but these are to be seen against the background of the WHOLE WORK, wherein, as Mahler himself said, he was striving to create worlds.   And each of the symphonies of Mahler is, in it's own right, a sort of world, a veritable cosmos, in terms of the size and monumentality of its corresponding conception.  Each symphony goes beyond the expression of mere sentiments of the moment, or the expression of "beautiful moments," but succeeds in expressing some aspect of a cosmic philosophy, which addresses the problems of God's nature, man's destiny, pain, suffering, and joy in the eternal, as it is reflected in the march of time within human experiences in this world.

No one has yet surpassed Gustav Mahler, though many have learned from him.

Much, much more could be said in Mahler's favor, especially with regard to his uses of orchestral color, and his ability to range from the most intimate solo passages to full scale clashes of titanic symphonic resources-- but I will leave it at that, providing just the bare outline of the arguments in his favor.   

He would never make for himself the grand claims that I am making for him, and would see himself as essentially a disciple and lesser student of the likes of Beethoven and Wagner.  It was his own modesty and humility with regard to his own talent, and his dedication to his work as a conductor, that made him look at his own work with a sense of proportion.  His greatness derives from that, and in his music we see less egotism and less "elevation of the self to the heights of grandeur" than we see in either Beethoven or Wagner, and it is this humility, perhaps, which also argues in his favor as a symphonist, or as a deployer of large orchestral forces, in comparison with Beethoven and Wagner.   

For those who don't know it well, or who wish to hear it again, hear is one his truly magnificent first movements, from the Fifth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Nq5fZDYOo

Mahler: Symphony No. 5 in C# Minor

Part I - I Trauermarsch. In gemessenem Schritt...

George Solti's performance of the work is impeccable in every way.

Leonard said:

I'm listening to Mahler. He has his critics, but I find he is a composer that searches the profoundest depths of his soul by exploring his human feelings through thoroughly, honestly and sincerely.

I'm not sure what others will make of that, it's not meant to be a robust intellectual argument and I'm sure it will be easily picked apart by anyone who chooses to approach it as such, but I just feel that's what is important to me; it's what I am ultimately interested in, not necessarily "music" per se. 

[Fredrick zinos]

Subjectively you are welcome to your opinion.

 

Objectively your claim seems a little far fetched since you are unable to define the terms "symphonist" or "greatest" in ways that would have universal approval.

[Michael Tauben]

Thanks for you compliment Ray. I'm afraid I'm going to write an essay for Ondib...sorry to you, Tombo and everyone else.

Ondib-  I think the first movement of No2 No6 and No9 are finer but  that's just a personal preference.

In response to you earlier posts. Please excuse the rambling and the length but here are some thoughts.

You said " The dogmatist is the one who remains closed to other possibilities.  In music, the dogmatist accepts equal temperament, certain standard intervals, certain key structures and acceptable key shifts as normal, and does not even consider others." 

Does not even consider others?

I'm not sure that such a person exists at least not a serious composer anyway. 

Let's reverse it and say the dogmatist remains closed to the idea that it is possible to write "excellent music for our age" while still using elements of tonality. 

You asked for my definition of tonality.

It is what happens in the vertical dimension of a piece. Harmonically. It need not be diatonic, or make use of 'key'. Organum could hardly be called tonal but modal polyphony can because what happens in the vertical dimension is of utmost importance. There is harmonic resolution, there is dissonance and consonance. And yes, before you say it, they are relative terms not absolute. This ingredient, this sense of a hierarchy of chords, of harmonic movement from one moment to the next is the cornerstone of 'art' music from the Middle Ages until Schoenberg. It is the basis for all folk music, popular music and nearly all jazz. It is a very, very expressive tool. I don't know enough about the music of Japan and China but I've never  heard any that makes use of this concept. Indian music certainly doesn't. 

What if your supposed dogmatist has considered all other possibilities but cannot find an adequate replacement for tonality. What if the things that tonality can do, expressively, structurally, dramatically are irreplaceable.?

I will continue to use the term atonal meaning music that makes no use of the concepts I have outlined.

However, lets move on.

I think we agree on most things, especially the importance of what you call standards and your response to Frederick regarding Von Suppe, I think is correct.

As to your point about getting 'accustomed' to new music. I absolutely agree. That we are surrounded from birth by music that is tonally simple- nursery rhymes, pop songs, film and television and the rest, well, that is a fact of life. This is the age we live in. Composers and audiences alike.

You said

"It is because our culture does not surround us with much in the way of quality “modern art music,” or foreign classical music (non-Western classical music)."

That may be one of those chicken and egg problems. The thing about much 'modern art music' is that it doesn't say anything to most people. You mentioned Finnegan's Wake a few pages ago. Here is an extract.

Here all the leaves alift aloft, full o'liefing, fell alaughing over Ombrellone and his parasollieras with their black thronguards from the Country Shillelagh. Ignorant invincibles, innocents immutant! Onzel grootvatter Lodewijk is onangonamed before the bridge of primerose and his twy Isas Boldmans is met the blueybells near Dandeliond. We think its a gorsedd shame, these godams. A lark of limonladies! A lurk of orangetawneyman! You're backleg wounted, budkley mister, bester of the boyne!

It is a very widely unread book just as _(insert name of any number of composers)__are very widely un-listened to.

It's nothing to do with with 'good' or 'bad' or 'standards'. Would you expect a contemporary author to always seek to push the boundaries of language?

Is it possible still to write 'excellent literature for our age' without abandoning common grammar, syntax, spelling? Perhaps people just like telling and hearing stories.

When not only tonality but also pulse, lyricism, phrase structure and repetition is missing we are entering the world of 'sound design'. Nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with serialism, magic squares or any other methodology but in the final analysis I just don't think they can replace what it is that tonality can do, that is, tell stories.

This could turn into a very long post so I'd better leave it there, for now.

You'll be pleased to know that I have been revisiting Gruppen and Nono's Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica and rather enjoying them although I have no idea if they are any good :)

[Tombo Rombo]

Just wanted to note that a long post can be good when a minimum of blind alleys are taken.  Your arguments are succinct and don't push out into unnecessary regions by griping on the 28000 meanings of a single word that isn't all that essential to the basic argument.  Anyways, love ya Ondib!  And nice post Michael.  Please, continue : )

[Leonard]

Raymond,

Your post seems a little elitist and confrontational and I'm not sure where it has come from really, but perhaps I have misunderstood it.

I'm not sure if I have offended you in some way, perhaps my last post has come across in a way I didn't intend - my response to Fredrick was not sarcastic, although I appreciate it may have come across that way, I was just trying to have some fun with him regarding his comment about the starbucks coffee. I meant it when I said I fully respect his opinion as I do with anyone - I think everyone has something valid to say regardless of apparent credentials.

Anyway, to answer your question "who am I to have an opinion here", I would say I'm no-one, which I presume is the point you want to make. That said, I registered to this site with the full intention to share compositions with a community of writers and I will do so, just not at anyone's insistence.

I would just like to add I feel like I have already learnt a lot from hearing the opinions of different writers on this topic, there are a clearly a lot of talented, passionate composers registered to this site and I'm grateful to be able to interact with such a community.

Raymond Kemp said:

@ Leonard

Who are you to have an opinion here. Let us hear some of your work.

The creator of this thread is a great musician along with other contributors and even the person who can't write a sentence without making it an essay has presented some dubious noises but you? nothing yet.

I'm only asking.

[Ondib Olmnilnlolm]

Tombo Rombo said,

"Just wanted to note that a long post can be good when a minimum of blind alleys are taken.  Your arguments are succinct and don't push out into unnecessary regions by griping on the 28000 meanings of a single word..."

I understand.  Maybe we can keep the upcoming discussion limited to 28 different definitions of the word "tonality."  (Or at least 280).

:  )

Love you too, Tombo.

Tombo Rombo said:

Just wanted to note that a long post can be good when a minimum of blind alleys are taken.  Your arguments are succinct and don't push out into unnecessary regions by griping on the 28000 meanings of a single word that isn't all that essential to the basic argument.  Anyways, love ya Ondib!  And nice post Michael.  Please, continue : )

[Ondib Olmnilnlolm]

Hello Michael,

 

Thanks for your excellent and detailed response on the issue of tonality and composition.  I want to think about what you said, and respond in an intelligent way, so I’ll just make one focused set of observations here, on the subject of Modernism and James Joyce, which can later be tied to music. 

You quoted James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.   At first I thought you were quoting it to illustrate a point about works of great genius, that are as sonorous in literature as music itself is.

 

What a wonderful passage you gave us!

 

Here all the leaves alift aloft, full o'liefing, fell alaughing over Ombrellone and his parasollieras with their black thronguards from the Country Shillelagh. Ignorant invincibles, innocents immutant! Onzel grootvatter Lodewijk is onangonamed before the bridge of primerose and his twy Isas Boldmans is met the blueybells near Dandeliond. We think its a gorsedd shame, these godams. A lark of limonladies! A lurk of orangetawneyman! You're backleg wounted, budkley mister, bester of the boyne!

 

After quoting that passage, you said, 

“It is a very widely unread book just as _(insert name of any number of composers)__are very widely un-listened to.” 

I was surprised you said that.  I don’t know how one can evaluate a work of literature or piece of music based on how widely “unread it is,” or how “unlistened to it is.”  By that criteria, Le Sacre du Printemps, should be considered a fairly poor work.   Still, I am not unsympathetic to your view.

 

I understand the difficulty which exists for those who wish to make an effort to appreciate a work like Finnegans Wake.  I didn’t take to it until I heard long passages read aloud by a very articulate, cultured and highly educated Welsh physicist.  It’s all in the way you first hear it read aloud; then one can appreciate the musicality of the whole thing.

 

Have you ever heard James Joyce himself reading Finnegans Wake?

 

http://www.chaucersbooks.com/

 

(Scroll down a bit and you can listen and read the text at the same time, if you like).

 

I think musicians might have a special advantage in appreciating  a work like Finnegans Wake.  This is partly why I was surprised by your comment.   In listening to (or reading) Finnegans Wake, it’s the feel of the words and the images that come to mind that are important.  It’s much more like a reverie or rhapsodic poem, or more like music, than it is like a story or a novel.

 

So the approach to a modern work, like Finnegans Wake, which tries to “understand it,” in a traditional Western fashion, as you might understand a short story, novel or narrative poem is bound to fail.

 

Everything that is valuable in Finnegans Wake can only be found if you GIVE UP and surrender the rational, calculating, and “comprehending” part of the mind.  I don’t mean, one has to completely neutralize the intellect, not at all.  The intellect has to relax, and cease trying to find sequence and traditional order, so that it may find instead meaning which is based on past associations, in perhaps the same way that dreaming is based on past associations—only in this case the dream is about all of contemporary conscious reality, and the subconscious extrusions are the content of the whole of human history, referred to in a way that may appear haphazard.   Add to this, the fact that it is all rooted in Irishness and Celtic thinking, which may appear alien or a bit exotic to someone strongly rooted in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon or Germanic mind set.  But it is also European and universal, in at least the Western sense.

 

All of this does have a bearing on our attempt to cope with the challenges of the “modern” and the “contemporary” in music, art, and literature.  But Joyce’s approach is one of many, perhaps one we need not consider, since it is outside the purview of musical composition.  It was, I believe,  a very fruitful approach, even a monumental one in literature, the effects of which are far from being understood or fully absorbed even today.  There may be analogues in music to consider.  I only raise the point because you speak as if you reject Joyce’s innovations outright, and this is certainly not the consensus of either the scholars or the artists who have been inspired by Joyce.   I cite Samuel Becket and Anthony Burgess as two outstanding examples. 

 

You might listen to the above link, Joyce reading Finnegans Wake, and play Stockhausen’s Gruppen (part 2), at the same time.   I just did that, and I think they may “inform” each other, with regard to “grammar” of thought and “rhythm.”  I know that may sound odd, but you may wish to try it as an experiment.   I think there is something there. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wwmh-yNlZY&feature=related

Stockhausen: Gruppen (2/3)

More later,

 

O.

[Tombo Rombo]

^^There is a piece by John Cage that involves an Irish tenor reading Finnegan's Wake and a bunch of other things going on, let's see if I can find that.  Ah, here it is, I misremembered a bit, it's based on Finnegan though.  It's called "Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake".  Here are a couple of links for you to explore about that; the concept sounds similar to your idea of the random convergence of Stockhausen and Joyce so I think you might find it interesting.  I haven't listened to any rendition of it, just remember reading about it once.

http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/music/cage_roaratorio.html

http://www.johncage.info/workscage/roaratorio.html

ahh, and here's a youtube video of it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdHe4c10smY

The concept sounds interesting indeed, the music kind of scares me.  Not the most intelligent evaluation I could put forth, but oh well.  I guess maybe it imagines that humans are capable of understanding much more than we actually are, in one sense, but some interesting textures occur in there the way I hear it (I've only made it 4 minutes in), and it is quite dull the rest of the time.  

As a side note, many people classify Cage as a postmodern composer, but I tend to disagree.  Cage seems more like modernism pushed to a ridiculous extreme, I can't quite articulate why, I'll think about that a bit more.

[Ondib Olmnilnlolm]

So, Michael, 

I am thinking over your definition of tonality.

You said,

"You asked for my definition of tonality.

"It is what happens in the vertical dimension of a piece. Harmonically. It need not be diatonic, or make use of 'key'. Organum could hardly be called tonal but modal polyphony can because what happens in the vertical dimension is of utmost importance. There is harmonic resolution, there is dissonance and consonance. And yes, before you say it, they are relative terms not absolute. This ingredient, this sense of a hierarchy of chords, of harmonic movement from one moment to the next is the cornerstone of 'art' music from the Middle Ages until Schoenberg. It is the basis for all folk music, popular music and nearly all jazz. It is a very, very expressive tool. I don't know enough about the music of Japan and China but I've never  heard any that makes use of this concept. Indian music certainly doesn't."

There is a lot here to discuss.

I'll start with one relatively simple question.

I'm linking to a piece of music.  It's about one minute long.   (See link below).   I don't want to tell you what it is, or ask you to guess what it is, because that might bias your answer.

Please just tell me whether you think this piece of music is tonal, in your view.  It's not a trick question, or anything like that.  My own opinion is that it is tonal.  I think  that it might be considered tonal, according to your definition, but I am not sure.

I invite others to tell me whether they think this piece of music is "tonal," or not.   I am interested in any opinion that anyone wishes to offer on the matter.  

Your response, Michael, will help me understand what you do and do not consider to be tonal.   Your response will help me determine whether or not I have understood your definition correctly.

[I do have some other questions, I would like to pose later, about non-Western traditions and tonality.]

Then, if you like,  we can go back to the discussion of the larger questions about "objectivity," "subjectivity" and how one decides what is "good" and "bad" in music.

[Michael Tauben]

Ondib,

I was not evaluating Finnegans Wake. I wouldn't presume. I was merely using it to illustrate a point about familiarity and experimental work. The point I was trying to make is that although it may be a masterpiece of unsurpassed excellence it is not at all surprising that it's style is the exception and not the rule. In other words, it is perfectly acceptable for a contemporary writer of 'art' literature to know and appreciate Joyce's piece but to not follow in his footsteps. It is possible to write 'excellent literature for our age ' that is based in 'everyday' language. 

Maybe it lies somewhere between poetry and prose.

Anyway, I'm way out of my area of knowledge and better return to music.

I have listened to the piece you posted.

I would say it is a little bit tonal but not very. It is made up of separate elements or strands that in isolation are even simple and diatonic. The layered combination of these strands cancel out any strong 'sense' of tonality and the overall affect may be characterised as polytonal by some people.   

The piece does have a strong pulse, lots of repetition, and phrase structure which aids comprehensibility (mine anyway).

[Fredrick zinos]

RE: Tonality. Paul Hindemith used to analyze Schoenberg and other 2nd Vienna school scores using the standard tonal methods and could show, he said, that the momentary suspension of traditional tonality was simply a matter of anticipations and suspensions.

 

 

[Tombo Rombo]

When I think of tonality, the Schenkerian notion of large scale prolongation of "the chord of nature" comes to mind.  A heirarchical relation of chords with the tonic as the center of gravity, every chord in the hierarchy having certain tendencies -how these tendencies arose is a chicken and egg situation: do we expect V to go to I because of some natural pull, or because of statistical learning (ie. that's the way it goes 75% of the time so that is what our minds expect)?  Nonetheless, the tendencies exist and work to create expectations in any listener grounded in the music of common Western practice, which as Michael noted, we have heard all around us since we were born.

(To imagine common western music as a big field might be problematic though.  Classical, Romantic, Baroque, Heavy Metal, Jazz, Celine Dion, these are all subgenres of Western music that have their own tendencies:  In Heavy Metal for example, VII-I is a lot more common than V-I.  Are there stylistic firewalls in our brains that help us in this game?)

When somebody creates their own system, using chords that do not follow these tendencies, the common listener will not  know what to expect, harmonically in any case, so a composer cannot play with these expectations.  If they want to create a piece that will play on a listener's anticipations they will need to focus on another area, or set up clear harmonic expectations from the start by lots of simple repetition or something of that nature.  Note, I am not saying that music has to play with expectations in such a manner, there may be other ways to write satisfying music.  But tonality provides a built in, rich field of patterns for a composer to use.  That being said, I do believe this is all very much culturally conditioned, and people are highly adaptable.  For example, I actually do kind of know what to expect when listening to Schoenberg for instance, as I have become familiar with that style:  I expect a sort of negative image of tonality.  I wonder if a baby is exposed to nothing but Stockhausen from the time of their birth if they will end up killing everyone? That wasn't how that sentence was supposed to turn out, you can fill in the blanks though. Concerning expectation in general, John Cage wants us to turn off our pattern seeking minds all together and surrender to the void.  That doesn't quite work for me, maybe it does for other people, especially if they take lots of mushrooms.