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Music Beyond Narcissism: A Glance Over the Post Avant-Garde
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11353 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1986 |
3,020 Words |
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Daniel Charles
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In his brilliant paper "A New Romanticism?" (THE World & I, No. 8), Kenneth LaFave has very convincingly shown how in our epoch a kind of "pattern principle" has been substituted for the expressive principle of Romanticism. Our music, he argues, lacks the dynamism that had grown out of the tonal system; we have gained the "completely dissonant" Serialism on one side and the "completely consonant" Minimalism on the other-but while mutually exclusive, they complement each other in that they use only static patterns. If Romanticism is over, have we gained anything?
I concur with Kenneth LaFave' pars destruens, which points to the necessity for the composer of today to keep a distance from any "pattern" of this sort. But I question relying upon the "dynamism" of tonality: Even if tonality is still alive, to pin one's faith on it may run the risk of narrowing the span of contemporary music, by reducing its reign to the "ethnocentric" field of the Western European tradition of the last two centuries. We may deplore the fact that the New Romanticism appears today only as a by-product, but we cannot forget that the very opposition between "dynamic" tonality and "static" non-tonality is a typically modern one; after all, the "dynamics" was the complementary part of the "statics" in Auguste Comte's "positivism."
As far as dynamism is concerned, we may wonder whether it is perceived as such in our performances of past music in equal temperament, where all intervals sound alike since the differences among the keys have vanished. "Until the sixteenth century, music had been composed around that instrument of infinitely variable intonation, the human voice. After the sixteenth century, music began to be composed around the fixed intonation of the keyboard instruments" (Peter Yates). The system of unequal fixed intervals found in the mean-tone allowed Bach and Kuhnau to widen the emotional significance, or affect, thanks to the "discreet introduction of dissonant [incorrect] relationships"-hence the subjectivization of composition and performance, since with the well-tempered tuning the harmonic coloration of each key was the personal affair of the player.
With the equal temperament, however, the division of the octave into mathematically equal intervals ("all quite imperfect and quite discordant") led to the leveling of the affects (hence the outbidding of "dynamism"), and not to the sort of equilibrium that Kenneth LaFave's thesis seems to attribute to tonality. The composer Ben Johnston describes eloquently the contemporary situation when he states that "over the whole of the historical period of instrumental music, Western music has based itself upon an acoustical lie. In our time this lie -that the normal musical ear hears twelve equal intervals within the span of an octave-has led to the impoverishment of pitch usage in our music." Therefore tonality cannot be taken today as a panacea.
Now, is it possible to build a music that would free itself from the predominance of the static/ dynamic split? As the German composer Wolfgang Rihm has suggested, what we need is not a "new subjectivity" or "new tonality" or "new Romanticism," but rather the purity of a "young Classicism," in the sense of Ferruccio Busoni's junge Kassizitat. When he noticed that the music of the Romantic era was more and more dissonant, thus losing its real dramatic significance, Busoni stated that since the conceptions of "related" and "foreign" keys were vanishing we would be left very soon with only "one single key"-which seemed to him a "most
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