TONALITY, MUSICAL FORM, AND AESTHETIC VALUE (Penultimate Proof)

Walter Horn

Professor Rahn takes the approach to the analysis of Western art music developed recently by theorists such as Benjamin Boretz and extends it to address non-Westem forms. In the process, he rejects recent ethnomusicological formulations based on mentalism, cultural determinism, and the psychology of perception as potentially fruitful bases for analysing music in general. Instead he stresses the desirability of formulating a theory to deal with all music, rather than merely Western forms, and emphasizes the need to evaluate an analysis and compare it with other interpretations, and demonstrates how this may be done. The theoretical concepts which form the basis of Rahn's approach are discussed and applied: first to individual pieces of non-Westem music which have enjoyed a fairly high profile in ethnomusicological literature, and second to repertoires or groups of pieces. The author also discusses the fields of anthropology and psychology, showing how his approach serves as a starting point for studies of perception and the concepts, norms, and values found in specific music cultures. In conclusion, he lists what he considers to be musical universals and takes up the more controversial issues implicit in his discussion.

TONALITY, MUSICAL FORM, AND AESTHETIC VALUE WALTER HORN n a remarkably audacious article1—at least for something found in a buttoned down academic philosophy journal—Diana Raffman, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, boldly states that atonal music is and must always remain, not only artistically defective, but a con game. “I claim,” she writes, that “in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot intend to communicate pitch-related musical meaning by writing twelve-tone music. . . . To that extent, twelve-tone music is fraudulent, and so not art.” 2 Her position may be familiar to the readers of Perspectives of New Music, since it is largely based upon certain results of empirical psychology compiled and theorized about by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff 3 that have received some attention in these pages.4 The main support for Raffman’s argument is provided by two empirical premises. They are: I 1. Human beings are psychologically (and/or physiologically) incapable of picking out what she takes to be the only “local structure” that can be supplied by twelve-tone rows as they are generally used in musical compositions written according to the technique fathered by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by such 2 Perspectives of New Music composers as Anton Webern, Roger Sessions, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and Donald Martino; and 2. Many human beings are capable of picking out the local structure in tonal music. In this paper I shall assume the truth of these claims.5 That is, I shall not contest the proposition that no listener—untrained or expert—can pick out by ear the “local structure” of twelve-tone rows—as presented either horizontally or vertically—in any of their versions (original, inverted, retrograde, or retrograde inverted). I shall also assume that many tonal works have local forms or structures that can be recognized in the approved manner, at least by experienced listeners. While I will return to these themes as we proceed, my main focus in this essay will be what, if anything, may be inferred about the artistic or aesthetic value of a piece of music if those two empirical claims are supposed to be correct. I As we want to know what connections exist between a certain subspecies of musical form or structure and aesthetic value, it will be necessary for us to explain our key terms: music, local structure, and aesthetic value. All three of these are controversial, and numerous books in aesthetics and music theory have been largely devoted to their explication. Fortunately, however, it is less important that we get full agreement on each deinition or general explanation here than that we ensure that we are both clear in what we mean and that we leave Raffman’s main thesis open to discussion. By the latter, I mean that we must be careful not to assume either what she wants to demonstrate or its contrary. For example, if we deine “music” in such a way that only those items that are in the key of G may be correctly called “music” at all, then there will be no question of interest regarding what makes Mozart’s Symphony in G more aesthetically valuable than Vermeulen’s Symphony No. 4, because based on that deinition, the Vermeulen piece isn’t music at all. It may well be that there is some batch of properties which is such that something is a piece of music if and only if it exempliies each (or enough) of the properties in the batch, but, if so, that cluster cannot be used to distinguish some specimens of music from others as one might use “being in the key of G” to distinguish the Mozart from the Vermeulen in ordinary English.6 Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 3 Moving on to aesthetic value, it is similarly clear that we cannot fruitfully investigate the relationship of form to value if we begin from a position according to which it is tautological that only that which has a structure of a certain kind can be praiseworthy. 7 Our knowledge that exemplifying this or that sort of form adds value to musical works must be something that can be learned through the experience of hearing music, because if it is taken to be a priori, claims like Raffman’s (and any responses to them) are unlikely to merit much interest, resulting as they do from deinitional choices alone. It is thus important to begin from the standpoint that what is good, great, mediocre, or awful music must be based to a signiicant extent upon aesthetic experiences. Analysts can try to explain these responses, but no theorist ought to suggest that it has discovered through the investigation of structure that what seemed a sow’s ear, is really a silk purse (or vice versa). We may ind, however, that while we do not want to beg any questions with our understandings of “music” or “aesthetic value,” it may be useful for us to do just that when we come to “local structure,” precisely because that recourse may assist us in leaving our main issue open to discussion. That is, in order not to get lost in the wilderness of debates regarding the nature of musical form, it seems preferable simply to ind a deinition that assumes the truth of the empirical premises noted above. I believe, at any rate, that such a move facilitates rather than biases discussion of Raffman’s thesis, since, although it assumes some controversial propositions, it also leaves the empirical issues of cognitive psychology to be resolved by experimentation within that ield. In addition, it would seem to immunize us from complaints issuing from the Raffman/Lerdahl axis that it is only our (presumably faulty) understanding of local structure that is preventing their empirical conclusions from seeming true. Based on the foregoing considerations, let us agree to deine our terms here in such a way that (i) “music” is guaranteed to include (at least) the continuum of works beginning with those Raffman takes to be towering masterpieces and ending with pieces that she considers fraudulent trash; and (ii) “local structure” (which we may assume includes such features as being a dominant-to-tonic cadence and being a modulation up a half step) is comprised exclusively of elements that can be heard (by those with suficient training) in tonal works only. It should be clear from the above that we should start with a deinition of “music” that is as broad as possible, one that has room for specimens of little or no aesthetic value. The following proposal has been made by Andrew Kania,8 utilizing an earlier attempt by Jerrold Levinson:9 4 Perspectives of New Music Music is (1) any event intentionally produced or organized (2) to be heard, and (3) either (a) to have some basic musical feature, such as pitch or rhythm, or (b) to be listened to for such features.10 Kania recognizes that this deinition has the apparent defect of deining “music” in terms of “musical feature” and gives his reasons for doing so, but rather than leave it as is, I think it would be better to eliminate what is at least an odor of circularity by using “sonic” in place of “musical” and illing out his list of “basic” features rather than leaving completion of it to our “musical” intuitions. To wit: Music = df. any event intentionally produced or organized to be listened to that either (a) has one or more of the sonic features of pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, or counterpoint,11 or (b) is intended to be listened to for such features. Whatever else may be said about this deinition, it seems broad enough not to beg any of the key questions that must be answered to determine if there can be a successful demonstration of the unavoidable artistic defectiveness and fraudulence of atonal music. In addition, it provides no basis for the proposition that anything that is music must be aesthetically valuable. Because it does not require something to be good to be music, the deinition is entirely consistent with the claim that some ield recording of an elevator shaft is both aesthetically valueless and nevertheless a piece of music. An additional beneit of the Kania/Levinson proposal seems to me to be that it requires a particular intention by the creator/presenter for an item to be considered a piece of music, at least insofar as any such piece must be an artwork. In an unpublished manuscript on aesthetics on which value theorist Everett Hall was occupied when he died in 1960, Hall noted that “There are aesthetic objects which involve no work of art: natural objects that are aesthetically appreciated.”12 So, for example, we may appreciate the aesthetic value of the sounds produced by a ield of peepers on a spring morning in New England as a result of an aesthetic experience markedly similar to that which we might get from a Penderecki concert, but the din we are admiring is not a piece of music, or perhaps better, it is not yet music, since if someone records it with the appropriate intention, it may be thus transformed into at least the sonic basis of an artwork. That our deinition allows for this distinction between nature and art seems to me an additional merit. We still have aesthetic value to deal with. Rather than defy both those who agree with G. E. Moore’s contentions regarding “nonnatural” properties (and the fallacy held to result from any attempt to Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 5 deine them)13 and those who have argued that values aren’t properties at all,14 let us abandon any hope of deinition entirely here, and settle for the lesser aim of simply trying to make clear how we shall use the phrase. In a review of Eddie Prévost’s Minute Particulars, I made the following remarks: Music (or any art or technology) may be evaluated from a number of standpoints. Consider a pair of sneakers. . . . We may wonder of these items: Will they hold up? Are they comfortable? Are they cheap? Were children exploited in their production? Etc. Each of these questions may be quite important to us, but each is also clearly distinguishable from all the others. . . . If, at the end of the day, Prévost concludes that the determination should be made that sneakers are “good” if and only if they get at least a B- on all, say, ifteen criteria, I will have no quarrel with the basic operative theory, though I may, of course, disagree with his conclusions. What must not be forgotten, however, is that we can also focus on just one of these ifteen criteria (e.g., “Are they nice looking?”) and consider it alone, in isolation from all the others. . . . I, with all my history, linguistic limitations, background, education, conceptual scheme, economic precursors, etc., have a concept of what I call “beauty” (which has been molded, of course, by all that history), and I am capable of ascribing it or withholding it to this or that piece of music (with all its own various and sundry history).15 It doesn’t matter either that the sneakers were produced by such and such culture or that I was. Though both of those claims are certainly true, neither one prevents me from pondering this aesthetic question in isolation from all the other considerations, and, what's more, I very often do.16 It is clear that no attempt is there made to deine “aesthetic value”— it’s my view that the concept cannot be broken down into constituent parts, so that only the pointless production of near synonyms could be managed if a deinition were attempted. Instead, I took the Moorean approach that all one needs is a gentle reminder that, whatever aesthetic excellence may be, it is certainly not this and not that.17 Fortunately, as indicated, we have no need either to deine “aesthetic excellence” or to tackle questions about its objectivity. For our purposes we need only be comfortable that we have a pretty good idea of what is meant by the expression. When we consider our preanalytic understanding of the phrase, it becomes clear that, although we may not know whether its assignment is objective or subjective, we 6 Perspectives of New Music do understand that it is something that musical and other objects of art or nature seem to us to have more or less of. We have come to know, too, that our evaluations of how much of it is found in various pieces may differ, not only from those made by others, but even from our own past assessments. Furthermore, some “experts” have opined that aesthetic values correlate directly with various observable and nonobservable properties of the items producing aesthetic experiences: formal structure, originality, and “depth” (or multi-facetedness) are among such properties. This basic grasp of aesthetic value should be suficient for Raffman’s purposes and our own. Let us, then, return to local structure to see if we can come up with a deinition for that term. When we do, we will be reminded that the concept is nearly as puzzling as the others. A compendious literature, from Fux to contemporary ethnological inquiries, and from Schenker’s spiritual musings to recent studies in cognitive psychology, has been devoted to the nature—or various natures—of musical form(s).18 It is important to note at the outset that it does not follow from Raffman’s notion of local structure in combination with the empirical premises that we have agreed to above that atonal music—including twelve-tone varieties—cannot have any sort of noticeable, traditional forms at all. After all, there have clearly been numerous dodecaphonic scherzos, sonatas, and fugues, including relatively obvious ones.19 Raffman calls those sorts of features “architectural” and is happy to concede that they may be recognized by some auditors even in atonal works. But, on her view, such recognition can never be an “understanding of the meaning” of an atonal work. Indeed, such features of a piece, recognized or not, cannot be the main basis of aesthetic satisfaction even in tonal works according to Raffman. She writes, It seems obvious to me that we do not listen to tonal music because we are interested in expositions, recapitulations, phrases, or movements per se. . . . Rather, the focus of our interest . . . seems to be the local harmonic and melodic events in a piece. Or, perhaps better, we ind the architectural structure of the music interesting only in the presence of perceptually real local structure. . . . Local harmonic structure [is] not “comparable to punctuation,” [but] rather to story line. The idea that we should ind the architectural structures of a tonal work interesting apart from its local structure is no more plausible than the idea that we should ind a book’s organization into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and so forth interesting apart from a story line. The trouble in both cases, I suggest, is that no feelings of the relevant kind would be engendered.20 Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 7 Raffman thus takes the “architecture” of a piece to be importantly subservient to its local structure, and claims that the “meaning” of a work can be derived only from the latter. As she puts it, “If twelvetone pitch structure is not perceptually real, if twelve-tone music cannot carry the pitch-related meaning it purports to carry, then it cannot be a vehicle for the communication of such meaning.”21 As I have suggested above, I think it would be quite dificult to try to deine “local structure” as used by Raffman here in any manner that is not obviously question-begging with respect to her empirical premises about what humans can and cannot detect. But, as also indicated, I believe the wisest course in this case to be to simply beg this question in favor of those premises. By that I mean we should settle on a deinition that not only comports with, but actually implies Lerdahl/Jackendoff indings about what listeners can and cannot hear. In particular, we want it to be the case that in twelve-tone music, empirical psychologists have determined that there simply is no recognizable local structure.22 Thus, as rondo and march forms can be noticed in a twelve-tone piece we will just agree that those cannot be elements of local structure. Where a piece has a cadential resolution that can be anticipated or a tonic that can be deduced from what has preceded it, we want our deinition to require that it has already been conirmed by empirical science that the piece cannot be serial. In a word, “local structure” will be that which is not recognizable by ear alone in twelve-tone pieces but is so detectable in tonal works. With those desiderata in mind, let us deine “local musical structure” as follows: F is an example of local musical structure = df. (i) F is some arrangement of melody, harmony, or counterpoint that is possible for the initiated listener to recognize or understand through (perhaps repeated) listening alone; and (ii) F is not instantiated in the arrangement of the pitches of any piece of music (or section of it) in which such elements have been chosen through the use of serial methods of composition. Now, obviously, we have deined away the possibility of any recognition of local structure in the pitches of a work in which pitches are arranged serially. Those in the Raffman camp need not see that as a cheat, however. They could respond to criticisms from that direction by asking, “What tone-row-speciic forms are there that can be recognized in dodecaphonic works but are not local?” And they will quickly respond that, since (according to Lerdahl at least) the answer is “none,” no harm can have been done to the backers of atonality by 8 Perspectives of New Music restricting local structure to passages that have no essential connection with any presentation of a tone-row. Lerdahl writes, Competent listeners to Le Marteau, even after many hearings, still cannot even begin to hear its serial organization. For many passages they cannot even tell if wrong pitches or rhythms have been played. The piece is hard to learn by ear in a speciic sense; its details have a somewhat statistical quality. Conditioning, in short, does not sufice. . . . The degree to which Le Marteau is comprehensible, then, depends not on its serial organization but on what the composer added to that organization. On the other hand, the serial procedures profoundly inluenced the stimulus structure, leading to a situation in which the listener cannot form a detailed mental representation of the music.23 Raffman could thus reply to complaints regarding question-begging by arguing that, since Lerdahl and Jackendoff have demonstrated that our inability to recognize tone rows in their various forms is nothing but a function of the physical limits to the human capacity to process information, there ought to be no objection to deining “local structure” in a way that relects that fact. The term will then just be seen as something that may be handy among psychologists as a name for a certain subset of features that people will never be able to detect in musical works that are organized in a particular fashion. We may learn to notice minuets, scherzos, and virelais in both tonal and atonal works, but though we can eventually come to tell (even, presumably, with respect to such envelope-pushers as Max Reger and Ran Blake) what notes the various cadences within tonal pieces can be expected to land upon, we cannot and never will learn to discern vertical retrograde inversions of tone rows through listening alone. And this inability is what is claimed to prevent us from having cadential expectations that go either satisied or unsatisied in serial pieces. I confess that this claim seems false to me, but, for the present, we will simply use “local structure” to relect this particular alleged difference between tonal and atonal works. Again, I will not spend time here contesting claims about limits to the discernment capabilities of the human brain. What will chiely interest me is Lerdahl’s suggestion that fans of serial music should be disturbed if we grant these alleged incapacities of “competent listeners” to Le Marteau, and, as we have seen, Lerdahl is not alone in encouraging distress over this matter. Let us consider now whether such apprehension is justiied. Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 9 II As we have already seen from Raffman’s remark about punctuation and story lines, much of the support for the proposition that where there is no local structure (as deined above) there can be no aesthetic value stems from analogies claimed to exist between music and a natural language like Chinese. Remember Raffman’s indictment: “If twelve-tone music cannot carry the pitch-related meaning it purports to carry, then it cannot be a vehicle for the communication of such meaning. Therefore I claim, in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot intend to communicate pitch-related musical meaning by writing twelvetone music.”24 To make sense, Raffman’s charge requires the premise that music, like spoken languages, is capable of semantic content. If so, and only well-formed musical phrases are semantically competent to “refer,” perhaps one need only show that atonal music is not wellformed to conclude that it lacks an ingredient that is necessary for aesthetic value. Stanley Cavell has made similar claims, although he has utilized the above-criticized plan of using the term “music” in such a way that, if some array of sounds lacks what he takes to be suficient “meaning,” it can’t be music at all. He argues that such similarities to a work of Bach or Berlioz as being played by violinists or requiring training of a certain kind to perform does not sufice to prevent a befuddled listener to a Xenakis orchestral work from sensibly asking, “But is it music?”25 Alan H. Goldman seems to concur with something like the “meaning” attribution and its relation to syntactic structure, at least to the extent that he takes understanding of the musical form of a work to be necessary to a certain higher level of enjoyment.26 He grants that one can get some sort of (I take it quite limited) “emotional” response without this “understanding,” but, on his view, higher aesthetic pleasure can come only where there is a deeper sort of “grasp.” And, on his view, inability to understand local musical structure, something which we have here agreed to assume follows of physical necessity from atonality, yields the very opposite of pleasure. When one fails to understand a piece of music, when one is at sea at a performance of an atonal piece, for instance, it is because one cannot follow and anticipate its course. One has no sense of being directed toward musical goals, of synthesizing sections into intelligible sequences in the process of hearing. If lack of understanding manifests itself in feeling this inability to follow, remember, and anticipate, then understanding consists in being able to do so. . . . Aesthetic failure in a piece is failure to engage listeners in the way 10 Perspectives of New Music described above. The experience of such a piece is not intense and rich, but narrow, impoverished, or banal.27 Goldman’s position is a bit different from Raffman’s though. He takes “musical meanings” to be “internal” or syntactic rather than utilizing anything like Raffman’s apparently referential “story” talk, so he is not, strictly, ascribing a semantic function to music. Indeed, his requirement of internality might cause him to deny that insertion of a reference to a Bach Chorale into a later work could make it more aesthetically valuable, while for Raffman, it would seem that such a feature could change a piece’s “story line.” In spite of what he takes to be the necessary connection between comprehensibility and value, Goldman is quick to insist that “grasp” will not come easily in the best works. The inest music is, on his view, dificult enough so that repeated listening by adepts will be rewarded with deepening understanding. There should thus be lots of “connections” to be found. What is completely or only partially “internal” to a musical work— and the effect of that supposed internality on value—is hardly obvious, however. There is certainly no uniformity of opinion on such matters, at any rate. I note that critics regularly point to one or more of the following pieces of possibly esoteric and in some cases arguably “external” information about pieces of music—or performances of them—as evidence of the high value: • It has a form that is precisely traditional. • It subtly alters the traditional form. • It radically alters the traditional form. • It ignores traditional forms. • It is actually performed by one person rather than the apparent three. (I am thinking here of a performance by Rahsaan Roland Kirk.) • The oboist performing it is actually simultaneously walking a tightrope (a performance by someone in Cirque du Soleil). • It is all performed with one (circular) breath (a performance by Evan Parker). Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 11 • It is completely written out. • It is entirely improvised. • It is the result of serial organization. • It is the result of aleatoric techniques. While some of these tidbits may be gleaned from repeated listening alone by a trained auditor without the addition of any “external” information, others may never be discoverable in that fashion. But should the use of outside assistance here be considered cheating of a kind that is relevant to aesthetic evaluation? Consider someone who hears a Mozart sonata at the beginning of a music theory course and again at the end. Will we insist that the intervention of a new understanding of the sonata form can prevent this listener from gaining additional appreciation for the piece? While the architecture of this piece was always “in there” whether the student realized it or not, that is also true of whether some Borah Bergman piece was improvised, and of whether a Prokoiev soloist is playing with one hand only. It may well be that these facts can be gleaned exclusively from “internal” data too—but only by one who knows enough already, and, presumably, the necessary information to enable the savant to glean this value, will itself be external to the work. A wide variety of information—whether or not available only to “the initiated”—may heighten (or decrease) a listener’s aesthetic appreciation. A child with no English may enjoy “Hickory Dickory Dock” for its rhythms and assonance, but appreciate it even more once the meanings of “mouse” and “clock” are learned. Goldman may consider the information here insuficiently “esoteric” (i.e., too easy to learn) to be quality-enhancing when it comes to a piece of music. But is that calculation altered by whether the child lives in an area where only Swahili is spoken and there is no one around to teach the English meanings? What if the words in question weren’t “mouse” and “clock” but “mimsy” and “outgrabe” (or, perhaps, “Husserlian epoché”)? The point is that Goldman’s dichotomies are false. “Completely predictable and therefore uninteresting” or “loose and seemingly unconnected, lacking in musical logic”28 are points on continua in which the age, culture, experience, and personal preference of the predictor/connector are entirely relevant. And, as indicated, just as the range between esoteric and obvious knowledge is gauzy, so is the distinction between what is internal and external information. In a word, Goldman’s 12 Perspectives of New Music discussion of the sorts of things that may be “understood” about a piece of music and what effects such information may have on the value of a work or a listener’s experience is unhelpful.29 Lerdahl peppers his writings with terms from linguistics and philosophy of language, and, in fact, much of his work with Jackendoff is intended to show that there is a “generative grammar” that allows us to “comprehend” (tonal) music we have not heard before, much as, according to the transformational theory of Noam Chomsky, innate grammatical capabilities are required to allow us to understand sentences (in a language we know) that we have never heard or seen before. Lerdahl is apparently of two minds (two contradicting minds, even) about correlations between comprehensibility and aesthetic value, however. He irst avers that “There is no obvious relationship between the comprehensibility of a piece and its value.”30 But he quickly discovers this missing correlation when he asks, “If a piece cannot be understood, how can it be good?” That this question is not merely rhetorical is clear from his answer to it: “Most would agree that comprehensibility is a necessary if not suficient condition for value.”31 Lerdahl does not suggest that he can prove any such Goldmanian correlations between aesthetic value and ease of comprehension as, for example, Too Easy: Bad; Too Hard: Also Bad; Moderately Dificult: Just Right. Instead, he concedes that his aesthetic judgments rely on unproven and unprovable axioms such as: “The best music utilizes the full potential of our cognitive resources.”32 But why should anyone expect any such axiom to be true? Perhaps only the most “advanced” listener can plumb the depths of some complicated and multiply referential work, just as only a very wise person might be able to ind a way out of some complex moral quandary. But why infer from this that the complicated piece must therefore be better than all simpler ones? We would surely not infer that a carefully modulated virtuous action must be morally superior to simple acts of good will that do not require the acuity of a Trollope to negotiate. Excellence in both arenas, while certainly consistent with complexity, does not seem to require it. In any case, I’d think it should be obvious that claims regarding the “meaning” of a musical work—what is conveyed about its musical form (which, it should be obvious, is purely syntactical) as well as its power to produce various emotional responses—depend on a very weak analogy. After all, mountain vistas of Vermont lakes also produce emotional responses and perhaps even convey geometric information, but there is no involvement of semantics. Strictly speaking, while scores may be said to “refer” to the sounds intended to be produced by Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 13 performers of the notations, the produced sounds don’t refer at all— although one piece may evoke thoughts of other things: as “Reveille” may remind us of the Army or summer camp or a piece by Ives. But the actual grammar of a piece of music is all syntax, and any allusion to semantics in this context is little more than a misleading metaphor. As there may be some who will disagree with my quite categorical dismissal of any claimed close analogy between linguistic and musical meanings, I am fortunate that the co-author of the work on which Lerdahl and Raffman base their claims agrees with me on the matter. Ray Jackendoff has written that most of what language and music have in common (such as metrical structure and apparent area of brain activity) “does not indicate a particularly close relation that makes them distinct from other cognitive domains.”33 Here are a few important dissimilarities between music and natural languages according to Jackendoff: • Musical meaning bears no relation to “propositional” linguistic meaning. • Music is made up of individual tones, formulaic patterns, and prolongational structure, while linguistic utterances are built up from words and syntax, which play signiicantly different roles. • Musical patterns are not associated with concepts, and melodies are not made up of conventionalized patterns in the way sentences are made up of words. • Music has no counterpart to the hierarchical structure of language that includes nodes with syntactic structures such as noun or adjective phrase. • Musical syntax has no counterparts to such devices as agreement, case, anaphora, ellipsis, or meaning expression. • Music has no parts of speech. For example, the tonic/dominant distinction is not analogous to either noun/verb or subject/ predicate/object.34 In sum, claims of a semantic dimension to music ought not to be taken terribly seriously. But isn’t it true that in languages like English nonsense can be made by syntactical means alone? Certainly, but where there is arguably no 14 Perspectives of New Music “sense” to begin with, it is misleading to talk of “nonsense.” There is no doubt that if we play an eighteenth-century sonata backwards or insert random passages into it every six seconds, we may have a sonata no longer, but there has been no showing that sonatas have any “meaning-derived” aesthetic quality not shared by non-sonatas; indeed, that was part of the point of claiming the analogy to speech in the irst place. We cannot infer that rearrangement of the measures of a Schubert sonata produces something that makes no sense from the facts that (i) “Wants engine a John ire red” is not an English sentence, and (ii) the rearranged sonata is no longer in any traditional form. To make such an inference we would irst need to establish the premise that sonatas have meaning in just the way that English sentences do. In sum, if the analogy between music and English is a weak one—and according to Jackendoff it is—some other basis will have to be found for the claim that sonatas in G trump non-sonatas in no key whatever in that only the former can be aesthetically valuable. III Where does this leave Raffman’s thesis regarding the defectiveness of all serial works? If we cannot trust linguistic analogies to help demonstrate defects in atonal music, can we, perhaps, follow Schenker in looking for a type of musical form having no semantic pretensions to provide the criteria we can use? Are there more exclusively musical formulae that will provide us with an infallible guide to the level of a work’s aesthetic value? Richard Taruskin, who has long made bales of hay from (at least the title of) Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?”35 has derided any such hope as requiring the commission of what he has dubbed “the poietic fallacy.” He makes it a quest that is at least as foolish as Rev. Casaubon’s absurd hunt for The Key to all Mythologies in Eliot’s Middlemarch. Taruskin writes, The beauty of a twelve-tone row, from the poietic standpoint, was that by furnishing a sort of quarry from which all the musical events in a composition—melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal, textural—would be hewn, it served as a sort of automatic Grundgestalt, absolutely ensuring the sort of demonstrable organic unity on which Goethean—that is, Schoenbergian—notions of artistic quality depended.36 Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 15 I think Taruskin is completely correct to be suspicious about qualityproviding formulae. But there is nothing new or exclusively dodecaphonic about the hunt for secret algorithms that can engender musical masterworks. At least since the seventeenth century (and perhaps since Pythagoras) there have been those who have believed that one can unfailingly produce aesthetically valuable music by ensuring that it instantiates a particular structure. H. H. Stuckenschmidt has noted that The dream that man might be a dispensable factor in the creation of music is not as new as might be thought. The scholars of the Baroque era keenly indulged in similar games and speculations. One of the cleverest of them, the Jesuit and natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher, gave an outline in his Musurgia Universalis (1622) of an apparatus called the Arca Musarithmica which could turn out compositions by a mathematical process.37 Furthermore, as Taruskin himself has pointed out in an illuminating portrait of John Cage,38 it is not really formality that is the culprit here, anyhow. Non-formal techniques, even aleatoric ones, have also been thought to guarantee artistic quality.39 I completely agree that the search for “transcendent” methods of construction that will provide aesthetic excellence is fool’s errand.40 As indicated above, knowledge of formal structure, method of composition, performance technique, or the geographical or historical location of a style can do no more than enhance or detract from otherwise obtained appreciation of a work. Such information cannot provide quality on its own. And it is clear that musicians on both sides of the atonality divide have failed to see this. It has not only been such Taruskin punching bags as Babbitt, Cage, Schoenberg, Sessions, and Wuorinen who have sometimes revealed their confusion on this matter. Those who believe that either Schenkerian structural coherence or the appropriate “inspiration” in composition or performance is either necessary to or suficient for the production of artistic quality commit the same fallacy. Indeed, this error has been committed by backers of spontaneous composition, too. For example, in the book by improvising percussionist Eddie Prévost referred to above, the amount of aesthetic value of a work is taken to vary directly with the level of “communitarianism” in that work’s creation as well as the ability of a performance of the piece to foster local collectivism in society at large.41 Another performer/theoretician, David Borgo, has associated musical value with, of all things, fractals. As I noted about Borgo’s book on this subject elsewhere: 16 Perspectives of New Music How can the fact (if it is one) that an Evan Parker solo more closely resembles a Cape Cod coastline, a hive of bees, or a Jackson Pollack painting than does a Bach or Ellington cantata, provide Parker’s music with any additional creds? Maybe the sole of my shoe is also more similar than the Bach to the coastline or the hive: what can that possibly prove about the artistic merits of my footwear?42 For Borgo . . . it is simply taken as axiomatic that (i) being analogous to something like “near chaos” or swarming behavior; or (ii) explicitly referring to any such natural processes; or even (iii) being a reproduction of some—say, a recording of brainwaves, frog chants, or plant behavior—will necessarily garner for any “musicking” the much sought-after property of “emergence.”43 To repeat, I agree with Taruskin that such theorizing is a symptom of the poietic fallacy and, thus, largely tosh.44 I insist, however, that this inability of an inner structure to make a work of music beautiful is as true of tonal works as it is of alea or dodecaphony. In the end, the level of a musical work’s aesthetic value must stand, irst and foremost, on its aural make-up and powers; examinations of form, genesis, or compatibility with theories of generative grammar will give us little guidance. Are we then stuck? Are there no tests at all that we can rely on to determine musical value? Matters are not quite as dire as that in my opinion. It is important to remember here that at least some of those who claim that atonal music is no good have long had what they take to be a more obvious reason for this accusation than any arguments regarding either the “local-comprehensibility” of (for example) twelvetone works or their paucity of any other type of magical structure or compositional technique. Moreover, this reason doesn’t depend on any analogies between musical and semantical properties. It is simply that audiences don’t like twelve-tone music. I take this accusation very seriously and agree with Taruskin that it would be a mistake to dismiss it based on some allegedly overweening structural arrangement or alchemical genesis of a piece. In my view, all those who agree that it is the reaction to the sounds that matters most should concede that at least some support may be derived for any claim that serial construction results in bad music from solid evidence that nobody likes dodecaphonic pieces. I do not mean to suggest that any such evidence would be dispositive. Tastes change, and, assuming for the moment that aesthetic values are not entirely a matter of culture, even large majorities can be wrong. Nevertheless, I take the claim that extremely few of those who have heard atonal music have liked it to Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 17 have at least some probative value—if it is true. Individual experiences of approbation and disapprobation must be given some level of prima facie weight by anyone who takes judgements of value to be meaningful. If any such judgement can be reasonably asserted to be correct, there must be an evidential component to feelings of approval and disgust. In the case of atonal music, supporters may want to take the responses of “the initiated” more seriously than those of the “unwashed,” but according to some anti-serialists, not even graduate students at Juilliard or their teachers really enjoy Webern, Babbitt, or Martino; they only pretend to. Raffman provides a good example of someone who holds this extreme view. She conidently asserts that “serialism has never really found an audience, and even trained listeners today are largely uninterested in it except as an object of theoretical or historical scholarship.” And she adds that dodecaphonic pieces “fail to engender musical feeling experiences,” insisting that if they were enjoyable we would “seek them out . . . but as a matter of fact we don’t.”45 Again, such claims seem to me important if true, and I think the defenders of atonality would have a responsibility to reply to them. But . . . are they true? We certainly cannot tell from Raffman’s paper, for she has provided no shred of evidence for these charges there. Many of us have heard anecdotes of riots said to be caused by atonal music—and we may have seen people quietly drift out of concert halls before or during a Carter quartet (as I sometimes feel the need to leave ˇ during Dvorák), but, of course, Slonimsky’s Lexicon46 makes clear that whatever is new has been derided as noise/garbage at least since Beethoven’s time. I have sought to ind quantity-of-performance data on the web and did discover one site47 according to which Schoenberg ranked 64th among classical composers in 2013 performances. (Britten —who wrote at least one twelve-tone piece himself—placed fourth in the world and irst in the U.K., presumably because of his centenary.) But as there was no information regarding which countries or concert halls were surveyed, how many people attended, etc., this “information” barely seems worth repeating out loud. Several things do seem clear, however. While it is doubtful that many works of strict serialism are being created anymore, due presumably as much to the dificulty in writing such pieces as to any claimed aesthetic defects, non-dodecaphonic, completely atonal music can now be heard nearly everywhere. At least since Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced Ligeti to the movie-going public way back in 1968, both ilm and television soundtracks have been rife with both “noise” and atonal “classical” segments.48 If these soundtracks have been considered unpleasant or 18 Perspectives of New Music without aesthetic merit by audiences, I would think that producers would get away from that practice.49 In addition, the huge proliferation of recordings during the last decade of non-tonal and often cadence-free pieces by Morton Feldman as well as of non-tonal, improvised electronic soundscapes by Keith Rowe, with and without others, is absolutely astounding. In fact, electro-acoustic improvisatory festivals (like Amplify) and labels (like Erstwhile) are multiplying all over the globe, in an era when people generally don’t go to concerts of non-popular music anymore—even of Tchaikovsky. Maybe it’s true that only a small portion of regular symphony orchestra concert-goers want to hear Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Babbitt, Martino, or Wuorinen (and maybe it’s not true: both the Berg Violin Concerto and the Schoenberg Piano Concerto seem to me to have become veritable concert hall staples over the last couple of decades), but what could we infer from that, anyhow? What portion of music listening is a matter of going to symphony orchestra or chamber music concerts at all? Raffman makes a quick allusion to the popularity of rap music, which she takes to have no local structure of the kind she admires,50 but suggests that what she believes to be the genre’s complete elimination of pitch makes it “presupposition eliminating”: it doesn’t pretend to care about local structure the way twelve-tone music does, so it is not similarly defective and fraudulent. The problems with that move are not only that “rap” encompasses a huge variety of music, some pitch-involving, some not, some tonal, some not. It is also the case that there are other popular genres that clearly do involve pitchutilizing material that often embrace atonality as well as wildly unpredictable rhythms. Think of the “death metal” of such groups as Meshuggah, Ulcerate, and Gorguts, for example.51 Furthermore, any claim that some works that it our deinition of “music” may actually have aesthetic value in spite of failing to have local structure is obviously an ad hoc adjustment to the original anti-atonality argument. That an epicycle has here been manufactured by Raffman to deal with the rap counter-example is clear from the fact that one could make a twelve-tone rap tune by speeding/compressing performance of the rows or changing their registers (neither would violate any serial rules) to such an extent that they would merely present percussive content to human ears. Would this work now be necessarily artistically defective qua a piece of dodecaphony, or is it possibly excellent qua rap, or both? (Is it perhaps only qua tonal concert music that twelve-tone pieces are always no good?) To return to the type of music Raffman is apparently more familiar with, it is interesting to note that Taruskin himself has written that he Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 19 admires not only Pierrot Lunaire, but several of Schoenberg’s early dodecaphonic pieces, and Lerdahl, as noted above, has said both that dificulty is no bar to masterfulness and that most tonal music is like most atonal music in being bad.52 Thus, Raffman’s empirical claim to the effect that nobody likes atonal music is wrong even if we restrict the universe of listeners to two of the three allies she relies most heavily upon in her paper.53 IV To be fair, as noted above, Taruskin does not endorse Raffman’s claim that no twelve-tone works are any good. He takes the more moderate position that, if any of them are aesthetically pleasing, this is in spite of, rather than because of, their serialism. He writes, Both Schoenberg and Webern, in their different ways, compensated for the nonhierarchical organization of pitch relations by building ad hoc hierarchies into their products in the form of signiicantly recurring chords, rhythmic patterns, or melodic shapes, or by emphasizing symmetries whether melodic (in the form of pitch palindromes, especially in Webern) or harmonic (chords that have the same intervallic structure when inverted). But why should one have to compensate in this way? If Schoenberg and Webern achieved beauty and communicativeness in spite of their methods rather than because of them, the methods might possibly be worth a critical look.54 Furthermore, Taruskin takes Schoenberg’s doctrine of the “emancipation of dissonance” to be entirely inconsistent with his use of traditional forms. For example, the elaborate fugue-making in Pierrot’s “Der Mondleck,” is foolish on his view, since the whole essence of counterpoint has always been “dissonance treatment.”55 If dissonance is emancipated, one superposition of several lines would seem to be as good as any other, so the whole process must be self-destructive. What Taruskin seems to miss here is that any complaint of this type, whether it concerns fugue-construction, twelve-tone technique, aleatoric artiice, or improvisational caprice, is nothing but the commission of another version of the very poietic fallacy that he has derided. We must judge music on its effects on listeners irst and foremost. The recognition that it contains a fugue or was derived from a star chart may enhance—or, I suppose, detract from—our enjoyment, but any direct focus on construction method as the fons et origo of 20 Perspectives of New Music some level of aesthetic value in music must always be mistaken. Thus, it is as confused to claim a piece to be beautiful in spite of its manner of construction as it is to demand the work’s praise because of it. It may be objected to this, as Raffman has, that there is an exclusive appeal of local structures that demonstrates an antipathy—or at least an indifference—to the serial form of any work. But, again, that seems simply false. Stuckenschmidt has pointed out, [In Berg’s Lulu] three different series are used as Leitthemen, as it were, each being allocated to a particular character in the opera. Berg also derives four three-part chords from the original series and assigns them as a motif to the central character of Lulu. By using other techniques of his own invention he obtains the remaining motivic and chordal material from the original series. The result is a highly strict piece of musical organization. Admittedly, the listener cannot recognize it as such on irst hearing. He can understand the music only by examining the score and closely studying its structure. But that in no way vitiates the work’s artistic quality. The same applies to all complicated forms of polyphony, notably Netherlands Renaissance polyphony, which likewise cannot immediately be understood unless the listener is thoroughly acquainted with the formal techniques involved.56 If different chords have different feels to them, then a different serial construction would have provided the characters in Lulu with different vibes and the whole opera with markedly different affective powers. That is, even requiring, as our deinitions do, that twelve-tone composition cannot result in recognizable local forms, we cannot validly infer that serial methods have no effects on the audible characteristics of a piece. After all, if that were true, it would be hard to see why Raffman or anyone else might dislike the sound of just those works that are atonal. And if what is actually heard may be affected by, for example, the choice of the tone rows, it cannot be the case that the resulting aesthetic quality of the work can only be in spite of its dodecaphonic method of construction.57 The actual (rather than intended) effect of the compositional method on the aesthetic result is strictly causal: all that may correctly be said to be irrelevant are the intentions or theory connected with the use of that method. It is in spite of those only that the work may be good or bad. The irrelevance of compositional intentions cannot remove the pertinence of the method itself to the result. Indeed, to suggest that it does so is to confuse reasons with causes, something which is itself the commission of an informal logical error (the so-called “genetic fallacy”). Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 21 If all this is so, why has there been so much concern about any compositional method that seems somehow “artiicial”? Why does there seem to be something suspicious about Schoenberg’s prescriptions, the use of computers, the hunt for fractals, and the tossing of sticks? It is my view that this attitude comes from the fear of being defrauded. Raffman warns us that with atonal music the performers may well be engaged in “empty musical mugging” 58 when they seem to be expressing themselves or the music. We can almost hear her whisper, “Don’t be taken in!” Cavell notes that this fear is far from new. He tells us that Tolstoy, a man who hunted deeply and persistently for marks of sincerity, concluded that all of the following gentlemen were heavily involved in the big con: Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Michelangelo, Renoir; the Greek dramatists, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Ibsen.59 No doubt there are perils on either side of “But the emperor is naked!” debate.60 But Cavell maintains that we must ignore the dangers and take a stand on one side or the other. If we know that “even a child” might have made some celebrated drip painting, ield recording, or drone piece; if a computer could make a twelve-tone work within minutes with the help of random number generation, Cavell tells us that we must ask “How is this to be seen? What is the [artist] doing?” “The problem,” in Cavell’s words, “is not one of escaping inspiration, but of determining how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or satisfactory, how he can mean this.”61 For Cavell, it is only by answering such questions that we can determine whether something deserves the name of “art.” But isn’t all of this worry about being deceived by tricksters just another artifact of the poietic fallacy? Instead of asking questions about how something was built, whether it fosters communitarianism, or what was intended to be conveyed by its creator, couldn’t we learn to trust our own aesthetic responses instead and consider all that other stuff—however interesting—just (tasty, tasteless, or over-salted) gravy? Why must those at the premiere of Rite of Spring who were moved to rock out compulsively be embarrassed if it later turns out that the piece was made by a computer or a seven-year old child? And why should anyone believe that they have discovered that the piece was better than previously thought if it turns out that there’s a perfect double fugue in there somewhere (and swell with pride if they noticed this feature all by themselves)? Again, I don’t suggest that all of these other matters are or should be entirely extraneous to our appreciation, that consideration of them cannot enhance or detract from our aesthetic experiences. I simply insist that they must be seen as secondary: they 22 Perspectives of New Music can’t make a bad piece good, or a good piece bad. Whether or not particular facts about the origin of a work obtain and have had their effects on the resultant music, the aesthetic value of an artwork is not, strictly, a function of the intention to utilize or abstain from a particular compositional technique. The goodness or badness of a piece is neither because of nor in spite of such intensions, except, of course, to the extent that their implementation (whether correct or incorrect) happens to make the music-as-heard better or worse. Cavell tells us that Tolstoy and Nietzsche agreed on many of the signs of fraudulence: “a debased Naturalism’s heaping up of random realistic detail, and a debased Romanticism’s substitution of the stimulation and exacerbation of feeling in place of its artistic control and release; and in both, the constant search for ‘effects.’” Wariness of such elements has continued.62 The use of birdsong, from Beethoven to Delius and from Messiaen to the maker of a ield recording, seems to be a case of ever-increasing “realistic detail.” But any decrease in what might be called “symbolic distance” in recent music is not found only in the portrayal of nature’s apparent indifference to human artiice. Where once a viol and shawm were used to depict the pain of a mourning parent, now a recording of an intensely keening mother may be heard loating above a string quartet in an attempt to intensify our empathy with human sufferers. Whether or not the birds were easy to tape or the recording of the mother constitutes her exploitation, must either represent a debasement of the music itself? If so, it must also have been debasement when Ives depicted the sound of separate marching bands crossing paths on a road, not by allusion, but by simply having two pieces in different keys and time signatures played simultaneously, or when Biber required the insertion of paper into violin strings to imitate drumming. If sights or sounds of nature are among the most beautiful, inspiring, or saddest things we encounter in our lives, why would we expect composers not to continue to mimic them in ever-new ways? And if the results continue to bring something of the non-composed—indeed entirely non-artiicial—world back to us as we listen, well . . . that’s a good thing, right? Surely we ought not to ignore our feelings of appreciation for what Hall identiied as (approximately) the appropriateness of the aesthetic surface to the capture of our object emotions because we disapprove of the composer’s means or theories. Indeed, won’t increasing our focus upon the dificulty or ease of creation or other compositional matters end up by making our emotional responses largely irrelevant? In fact, if dificulty of construction or intent to defraud are crucial to the determination of artistic value, it seems we should be hiring investigators, taking depositions, or Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 23 reading interrogatories instead of going to concerts, buying recordings, and reading reviews. For, surely, listening to music is a very imperfect way of determining compositional intent or method. I note, however, that such an inquisitorial approach would mean that any composers saying they don’t care whether we listen would be absolutely right, because it suggests that correct appraisal of aesthetic merit should no longer be based upon what music sounds like at all. V Let us consider where we have arrived. We started with an argument as to the necessary worthlessness and trickery of twelve-tone music (which were claimed to likely apply to other atonal music as well). Ignoring some of the niceties included above, this argument can be briely put as follows: 1. Tone rows in serial music cannot be recognized when heard even by trained listeners. 2. Only such music as contains forms that can be recognized when heard by trained listeners has aesthetic value. 3. Therefore, serial music has no aesthetic value. We have agreed to assume the truth of (1). There is no reason whatever to believe (2), however, which seems to require either commission of the poietic fallacy or an apparently false empirical claim about what no listeners enjoy (or both). Turning to (3), it would not follow from (1) and (2) even if both were true, because pieces that are serial in their construction might contain recognizable features other than tone rows that are nevertheless a function of the choice of those rows and their manner of presentation. We have seen that proponents of the argument might respond that the dodecaphonic structure itself adds no value to pieces containing it, based on the theory that what itself cannot be recognized can only accidentally contribute to anything that can be recognized. We can try to help such proponents with their attempt to rehabilitate the above syllogism by altering (3) as follows: 3*. Therefore, the serial construction of a piece adds nothing to the aesthetic value of that piece—except by accident. 24 Perspectives of New Music But (3*) is also false: it is wildly implausible that in even so “cerebral” a work as Le Marteau, the choice of rows and their presentation were not considered at all, and in, for example, the (audibly recognizable) mirror imaging that occurs between various voices, that all the effects of those choices were produced entirely by chance. 63 It is important to note here that effects of unheard (even unhearable) local forms of strictly tonal works may also have intended effects. For example, trained listeners without perfect pitch generally cannot pick out the particular key a tonal piece is in, though they can usually tell if it is in a major or minor version of that key. Yet base key choice clearly does inluence the aesthetic result, not only because of any alleged alteration in the particular “mood” associated with each tone, but for such mundane reasons as its effect on orchestration possibilities due to constraints imposed by instrumental ranges. Furthermore, chosen items can cause effects even in cases where those choices were not intended to affect the character of the creation in the manner that they did. The intentions or applicable theory behind them are neither identical nor essential to the choices resulting from those intentions or theories. Causes must not be confused with reasons. We may conclude, therefore, that Raffman’s syllogism is not salvageable: it contains at least one false premise, and is invalid to boot. But does this mean that one cannot revel in the mastery exempliied by, say, Art of the Fugue? Not at all; we must just remember that such formal brilliance considered on its own is much like that of an elegant computer program, another creation that might command our admiration. It could be objected that while one can hear the form of the musical work when it is played, there is no closely analogous way to notice the perfection of the computer code in its implementation. I don’t know if that is the case, myself. But, supposing it is true, nothing of importance seems to me to follow from it. It would allow us to note only that music sometimes has the potential to show its compositional form in implementation in a manner that computer programs do not. It may well be that to the extent that computer programs have aesthetic value, such quality can derive only from recognition of the formal structure of the codes by means other than witnessing the implementation of those programs. If so, computing differs from music in that respect. Whether or not that is the case, there would seem to be no more help for Raffman’s thesis to be found in differences between music composition and computer programming than there was to be gleaned from alleged similarities between music and spoken language. As many readers will at this point be at the end of their theoreticophilosophical tethers, let me quickly point out that I absolutely agree Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 25 with them. In fact, that very frustration was the main impetus for this paper. How much does it matter if a canon in Roussel’s Third or Shostakovich’s Fourth is constructed as Fux or Schenker would have liked or if these later composers actually cheated a bit here and there? Are musical creations necessarily better if they don’t stray from accepted forms at any point? Or, restricting ourselves to Raffman’s local structures, why should it be thought that the absence of a home key must still produce endless discomfort in every listener in the 21st Century? Even if we concede that a V-I cadence is “naturally” tension reducing, can’t people have later come (perhaps through weariness of hundreds of years’ use of this “natural” phenomenon) to instead ind themselves calmed irst by Ives’s Unanswered Question, a written out Tournemire organ improvisation, or Webern’s pointillism (and still later ind comfort in the icy sonorities of Ligeti’s Lontano, the ferocious, atonal hammering of Cecil Taylor’s solo performances, or a faint, undecipherable background radio broadcast in a performance by AMM?64 Neither being “natural” nor being “correct” provides an unerring path to musical serenity, let alone aesthetic merit. A Picardy third, beloved by someone when she is twenty, may have become to her the equivalent of a (“naturally” irritating?) ingernail squeak on a blackboard by the time she has turned forty. Clearly, Diana Raffman does not enjoy atonal music (or at least did not in the early 2000s). That is (or was) her privilege. She has not, however, either discovered a necessary defect or uncovered a pervasive fraud in this despised subgenre. She has merely attempted to justify her distaste by suggesting that it is founded on both science and reason. But the science is junk and the reasoning is bad. Let me not be overly harsh here, however. Raffman may console herself in the fact that in this sphere there will never be any science or reasoning that is competent to the task she has in mind. Values, both moral and aesthetic, are nearly identiiable by their resistance both to scientiic investigation and philosophical proofs. At any rate, for my own part, Ich habe genug! Let there be an end to all this absurd and largely fallacious theorizing! Let us just listen! 26 Perspectives of New Music NO T E S 1. Diana Raffman, “Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27/1 (2003): 69–87. 2. Ibid., 86. As suggested by this charge, most of the focus of Raffman’s article is on twelve-tone composition, but she indicates that she takes her claims to extend to atonal music generally, since, on her view, serial technique is “just an especially strict form of atonal composition” (69). 3. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 4. See in particular James Boros, “A ‘New Totality’?” Perspectives of New Music 33/1–2 (1995): 538–553; Fred Lerdahl, “Tonality and Paranoia: A Reply to Boros,” Perspectives of New Music 34/1 (1996): 242–251; and James Boros, “A Response to Lerdahl,” Perspectives of New Music 34/1 (1996): 252–258. 5. Not everyone has done so. In the papers cited above, James Boros questions a number of the conclusions that Lerdahl draws from various results in empirical cognitive psychology. Furthermore, I believe it is instructive that signiicant portions of classic instruction manuals in dodecaphony are devoted to techniques that can be used to keep traditional tonal structures from “polluting” twelvetone music. See, for example, Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique (New York: Schirmer, 1940). If local structures of serial pieces can closely resemble those of tonal works, and the latter forms are recognizable in the manner approved by Raffman, it could be argued that the former must be so as well. I will discuss this issue in more detail below. Finally, the view that twelve-tone music is not a species of tonality is subjected to a lengthy critique in Richard Norton, Tonality in Western Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984). Norton says, for example, “If twelve-tone music can—and does at times—completely efface key-centered music (and all characteristic loyalties) how does it remain tonal? The answer is a simple one: by the continuing operation of the cognitive ratio as composer upon the inherited reservoir of pitch data, that is, twelve pitches within the chromatic scale. Taking the half-step as the smallest melodic and harmonic point of reference, twelve-tone composers both speculated upon and composed a music in which Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 27 loyalties were ignored in favor of other forms of tonal coherence” (269). However, as Norton’s uses of “tonal” and “tonality” are somewhat heterodoxical, I will ignore any criticisms of Raffman’s thesis that might originate from that direction. 6. In his The Aesthetics of Music, Roger Scruton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) seems to utilize a deinition that would disqualify a lengthy, unchanging drone from being a piece of music. He remarks, “What I hear in . . . sound, when I hear it as music . . . is the intentional object of musical perception and is characterized through variables (pitch, rhythm, melody, and harmony), which organize the tonal surface, and outline an acousmatic space” (79). While his use of “hear in” apparently moves what is essential to music from the piece itself to an auditor of it—a move which would seem to make various sounds music for some listeners (perhaps only occasionally) and not music for others—we may assume that the variables Scruton speciies as requirements for anything to count as music are thought by him to be internal to the work itself. That is, if a listener were to imaginatively imbue the painting of a dog with harmony, melody and the others, that listener would not have succeeded in making either Fido or the portrait of him into a musical work. On Scruton’s view, such characteristics must in some sense be discovered in the work, not inserted there by listeners. This is also suggested by his remark that “A composer who offers nothing but igures, as in the endless daisy chains of Philip Glass, invites us to hear only background: in such cases the music slips away from us, and becomes a haze on the heard horizon” (63). 7. Heinrich Schenker, in his somewhat mystical Free Composition, (New York: Longman, 1979, xxii) takes such a question-begging approach to aesthetic value, allowing only pieces infused with “coherence” of a type the author deems desirable to have any artistic merit whatever. 8. Andrew Kania, “Deinition,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Kania (London: Routledge, 2011) 3–13. 9. Jerrold Levinson, “The Concept of Music,” in Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1990), 267–278. 10. Kania notes that he has replaced “sound” in Levinson’s deinition with “anything intended to be heard” so as not to rule out works or (sections of them) involving extended silences. Ibid., 10–11. 28 Perspectives of New Music 11. I have added counterpoint to the more traditional triad of melody, harmony and rhythm, to ensure that no examples of musique concrète that consist largely of overdubbed speech would be excluded. I owe to Larry Tapper the observation that, based on the inal pages of his Harmonielehre, Schoenberg would likely have included timbre or texture (or both) to this list. And the Ruth Crawford Seeger and Elliott Carter wind quintets both make early compelling cases for such inclusion. I leave further tweaking here to the reader. 12. Everett W. Hall Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. See also Thomas Thompson, “Hall’s Analysis of Aesthetic Value,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 4/3 (1966): 177–191. 13. See, for example, George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 14. The emotivistic theories of A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, and the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare are well-known examples. 15. Walter Horn, “Book Review: Edwin Prévost, Minute Particulars (Matchless),” One Final Note: Jazz & Improvised Music Webzine, (2004), http://www.oneinalnote.com/features/2004/prevost/. 16. Ibid. (Note that these inal two sentences actually appear in the middle of the previous portion of the block quote.) I note that there is a problem with my remarks in that they conlate aesthetic excellence with beauty. Hall (Papers) pointed out that while “beautiful” is often associated with “pretty,” there may be aesthetic excellence in the downright ugly, and added that “the deformed, shocking, etc., are not excluded from occurrence in aesthetic objects, sometimes of the highest excellence.” And for his part, even Scruton (Aesthetics of Music, 305) concedes that “atonal idioms can be used to invest the most repulsive and trivial situations with an aura of universal signiicance.” We may suppose that some art works provide us with a sort of emotional “distance” from the “ugliness” or “deformity” either of some depicted item or some sensory surface or both. Hall (Papers) made aesthetic experience a feeling for the appropriateness of the means used to create distance between a heard (or seen) work and what he called the “object emotion” (e.g., someone’s response to seeing a deformed sufferer, religious icon, or dangerous snake in a nonaesthetic context). That is not a deinition, of course, and if it Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 29 were, it would merely produce equally dificult issues involving the determination of greater or lesser “appropriateness.” 17. Again, many have denied the existence of any such thing as aesthetic value, and many who do countenance it take it to be entirely a function of either personal or cultural preference (or perhaps evolutionary usefulness or some other natural property or properties). These are ancient disputes, and I will discuss them here only to the quite limited extent required to make sense of the alleged correlation between atonality and aesthetic worthlessness. 18. Readers interested in these issues may enjoy the writings of James Tenney and Harold Fiske on the subject, as well as those of Scruton. Many of these discussions are careful, acute, and illuminating, if, perhaps, not terribly lively. 19. Consider, for example, the Minuet in Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4. See also Tse-Ying Koh, The Twelve-Tone Method and the Classical Tradition in Roger Sessions’s Symphony No. 3 (Masters Thesis, Rice University, 1995) and Krenek, op. Studies in Counterpoint crab canons. It is worth remembering that Schoenberg considered himself a disciple of Mozart when it came to string quartet writing. 20. Raffman, 83. Raffman’s claim that recapitulation (i.e., repetitions) can be interesting only in the context of tonal structures is not obvious to me. Consider, for example, Steve Reich’s Come Out or countless other tape-loop pieces not involving tonal elements. Presumably, Raffman would handle this objection the same way she deals with the issues involving rap music discussed below. 21. Ibid., 86. Note the “purports” here. Obviously such a term might be useful to one who plans to bring a suit involving alleged fraudulence. 22. I leave for later the point that if this supposition were actually the case, it would be quite strange for so many composers to have taken such care in picking one row over another and for instructors of serial technique, from Schoenberg to Cope, to have wasted so much space on these matters. The importance of the choice of particular rows, particularly in Berg, will be considered below. 23. Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” Contemporary Music Review 6/2 (1992): 98. I will discuss the implied extent to which twelve-tone composers can only “add to” or “subvert” serialism by non-serialistic means in later sections. 30 Perspectives of New Music 24. Raffman, 86. Obviously, Raffman’s claim would not be quite right even if her contentions about linguistic similarities were correct, because, surely, one can try to express something but (unintentionally) use inappropriate means for the task. That is, fraudulence would seem to require an intent to deceive, and ought not to be alleged merely on the basis that one has used ineffective media for the production of some effect. 25. Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 84. Cavell seems to conclude that, where there are no touchstones of tonality present, the answer to the “But is it music?” question is largely a function of whether the piece is intentionally fraudulent. I shall discuss the accusation of fraud perpetration in Section IV. 26. Alan H. Goldman, “Value,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Kania and Gracyk (London: Routledge 2011), 155–164. 27. Ibid., 161. 28. Ibid. 29. There is a current top-ten radio hit (“All of Me” by John Legend and Toby Gad) whose lyrics contain the following consecutive lines: “What’s going on in that beautiful mind? I'm on your magical mystery ride.” These lines make two extremely trite pop culture references, but my fourteen-year-old daughter was not familiar with either the Beatles album and song or the book and movie about John Nash until I mentioned these facts to her. Her appreciation of the song was increased as a result of this “esoterica.” We could refuse to call such appreciation aesthetic, but I believe it would be quite dificult to make any sensible distinction about what counts as aesthetic pleasure that excludes recognition of “extra-musical quotations” but includes recognition of, for example, an insertion of a melodic passage from Bach or Cole Porter. Such exclusion would likely make the appropriateness of a “setting” of a poem or libretto aesthetically irrelevant. 30. Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” 118. 31. Ibid. Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 31 32. Ibid., 118–120. Although Lerdahl is not clear about this, I take it that the potential of some piece to tax our “grammatical” capabilities to the limit is again considered only a necessary, and not a suficient, condition for that work to be of high aesthetic merit. 33. Ray Jackendoff, “Music and Language,” in Gracyk and Kania, The Routledge Companion, 111. 34. Ibid., 111–112. 35. Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity (Feb. 1958). 36. Richard Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy,” in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) 319–320. 37. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Twentieth Century Music, World University Library (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 203. 38. Taruskin, “No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage,” in The Danger of Music, 261–279. 39. Taruskin inds a similarity between the sound of Boulez’s Structures for Two Pianos and Cage’s Music of Changes and believes he has uncovered the reason for it: “What both composers accomplished with these works was the replacement of spontaneous compositional choices—choices that, in Cage’s oft-incanted phrase, represented ‘memory, tastes, likes and dislikes’—with transcendent and impersonal procedures. . . . The difference between Boulez and Cage was only supericially a conlict between order and anarchy. It was, rather, a conlict between disciplines, both eminently authoritarian, both bent on stamping out the artist’s puny person so that something ‘realer,’ less vulnerable, might emerge. Cage’s ‘chance operations, very rigorous and very tedious, were just as effective a path to transcendence as Boulez’s or Babbitt’s mathematical algorithms” Ibid., (264). 40. I ind it amusing that while Goldman inds ultimate support for his defense of (apparently algorithm eschewing) tonality in Hegel: “Music . . . represents the purest kind of Hegelian overcoming of matter by mind, the purest expression of the creative human spirit”(Value., 164), Taruskin lays most of the blame for what he considers Schoenbergian and Cagean confusions right at Hegel’s feet. These errors are claimed by Taruskin to be a direct result of the “Hegelianization” of music history (Taruskin, The Danger of Music), 301–329. 32 Perspectives of New Music 41. Eddie Prevost, Minute Particulars: Meanings in Music-Making in the Wake of Hierarchical Realignments and Other Essays (Matching Tye: Copula, 2004). 42. I’m guessing that I ind my recurring references to shoes as mysterious as the reader does. 43. Walter Horn, “Review of David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum),” Signal-toNoise: The Journal of Improvised & Experimental Music 41 (2006). 44. It seems that Babbitt and Boulez have also agreed with this, at least on occasion. In his “A ‘New Totatlity’?,” James Boros relates a conversation between Boulez and Robert Moevs in which Boulez indicates he once told a student that it would be “missing the point” to try to ind tone rows in his work. Boros also quotes Babbitt’s remark, in Words about Music, that “analyzing a twelvetone piece is not a matter of inding the lost set. This is not a matter of cryptanalysis (where’s the hidden set?). What I'm interested in is the effect it might have, the way it might assert itself not necessarily explicitly” (552). Boros’s mocking remark regarding Lerdahl’s views regarding the importance to listening of “the inference of structure” is wonderfully apt: “I really like Coltrane’s ‘Meditations’ because you can infer a lot of structure from it. Oh, and it also makes me cry, but that’s beside the point” (545). It seems, then, that on the existence of the poietic fallacy, Boros agrees with Taruskin and me. 45. Raffman, 84. 46. Nicolas Slonimsky, A Lexicon of Musical Invective (New York: Coleman-Ross, 1953). 47. http://bachtrack.com/2013-stats. 48. Indeed the list of composers contributing to Scorsese’s Shutter Island reads like the names of individuals who have received performances by the Ensemble Intercontemporain since that group’s inception. 49. It could be argued that those segments are mere sound-effects, that if they add something to the video, it’s not aesthetic value but some other sort of more pragmatic virtue. But I note that not only critics and award bestowers but regular people apparently enjoy numerous atonal contributions to movies and television—whether by Goldsmith or Penderecki or the multiple soundscape designers Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 33 of Breaking Bad or Hannibal—enough to buy or download these tracks for the purpose of listening to them in the absence of any video accompaniments. I wonder whether, when people buy a Mozart or Rachmaninov (rather than a Takemitsu or Ligeti) piece after irst hearing it while watching a movie, it is widely suggested that such purchasers are not buying this music for its own musical merit but for some other reason that is unrelated to appreciation of its aesthetic qualities. Were all those who bought a recording of a Mozart piano concerto after irst hearing the piece during Elvira Madigan or Amadeus also either trying to recall scenes from these ilms or looking for ways to impress artsy poseurs? 50. Raffman, 85–86. 51. One may actually go back at least to Captain Beefheart. 52. Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” 115. And, though Lerdahl doesn’t mention this, it may take a bit more time to assess value with art that is unfamiliar. As Charles Rosen has pointed out in a review of Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music, “Works of modernism notoriously require relistening, rereading, reexperiencing. With music, we must learn what to listen for—or, indeed, what not to listen for.” Rosen, “From the Troubadours to Sinatra: Part II,” New York Review of Books (March 9, 2006). 53. The third is Cavell: I’m not sure where he is on this matter. Fortunately, we don’t need to know the preferences of any of those three to know that Raffman’s claim that dodecaphonic pieces “fail to engender musical feeling experiences” is false: we can consult our own experience. However, as it is conceivable that there is a reader or two of the present article who cannot determine the clear falsity of Raffman’s remark from his or her own listening past, I am happy to let such readers know that I am quite certain that she is wrong based on my own personal “feeling experiences” during many serial works. 54. Taruskin, “Does Nature Call the Tune?,” in The Danger of Music, 48–49. 55. Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy,” 320–321. 56. Stuckenschmidt, 97. 57. Andrew Mead has made a related point. “Tonal forms as they have developed reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to the possibilities of 34 Perspectives of New Music the tonal system, to the point where certain aspects of tonal form are inextricable from tonality. Similarly, the twelve-tone system possesses its own particular form generating tendencies, based on the sorts of relationships available within it. However, given the wide range of strategies available in each system, it is not inconceivable that there may be an intersection of the two systems’ strategies which might lead to a degree of similarity that would not belie the integrity of either tonality or the twelve-tone system.” “‘Tonal’ Forms in Arnold Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987), 92. 58. Raffman, 85. 59. Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say, 193. 60. Cavell notes that Saint-Saëns thought Rite of Spring was a base trick and ended up stripped of dignity himself. 61. Ibid., 205–206. 62. In his contribution to David Cope’s colloquy on computer creation of works in the style of Bach, Daniel Dennett notes that, “Many ind this vision of creativity deeply unsettling. Some would add that it is . . . crass, shallow, philistine, despicable, or even obscene.” “Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble,” in Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) 283. 63. Consider again the effect that particular row choices have had in Berg. Scruton has written that in that composer’s Violin Concerto, “the serial organization is subverted by the use of a tone-row which divides into two distinct and clearly tonal regions: G minor, and B major/F sharp major. And from the outset the serial structure is submerged by the surface elaborations. There is a melodic movement, beginning in the irst motif on arpeggiated ifths, that sustains itself through repetition and parallelism, and causes us to hear tonal harmonies even in the most discordant of the orchestral chords. When the music comes home at last, to the lovely prayer in which Berg quotes from Bach’s setting of ‘Es ist genug,’ it comes home also to the second tonality of the tone-row, and uses all the devices of triadic tonality.” Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music 298–298. Obviously, one can’t “subvert” tone rows without consideration of their pitch orders and how they will be used. Another example of the effect of twelve-tone choices on the feel of Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 35 a piece is the Adagio of Sessions’s Third Symphony, which is so clearly elegiac that nothing the composer could say seemed capable of convincing listeners that the movement was anything but a heartfelt response to the death of Koussevitsky. See Koh, The Twelve-Tone Method, xvi, 31–43 and Andrea Olmstead, Roger Sessions, A Biography (New York: Routledge, 2008), 316–327. 64. To resort for a moment to personal preferences, I can report that I sometimes think that if I hear one more instantiation of the twelve-bar blues form I might have to strangle myself with a guitar string. From my own somewhat jaded perch, any alteration, even as a result of error or omission, is likely to make a blues tune more enjoyable. I’m not alone in this, I don’t think. The Shaggs weren’t revered in some quarters because of their mastery of traditional pop song forms: quite the contrary in fact. And, as noted above, extreme metal groups clearly work hard to make pieces that are very dificult to predict either melodically or rhythmically—no matter how great a variety of music listeners have heard or studied before. It could be said that it is as hard to headbang to Meshuggah as to waltz to Schoenberg. Those are not necessarily faults. Some people enjoy precisely that dificulty (after all, dance has also changed since Strauss’s time); others have no particular interest in either waltzing or headbanging in the irst place.

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