An old debate about music

An old debate about music seems to have popped up in St.Blog’s parish recently. I was going to leave well enough alone, but I cannot resist. The topic in question is too much in my bailiwick for me to let it slide without comment. I will warn you, this is a long post, but if you are thinking of jumping into this debate, please read it. Music is a complicated matter, and what I have written here barely scratches the surface of what one needs to know to be informed what is at stake. This post, then, is my introduction. I am currently working on a gigantic work on the Theology of Art, and a third of it is dedicated to music (painting and bullfighting make up the rest, at least for now, although food seems to be on the sidelines taunting me, daring me to ignore it). I will post more later, because this is far too big a topic to cover in one late night blogging session.

The topic is the inherent morality of certain genres of music, primarily rock and roll, but secondarily modernist atonal music. The first problem in the discussions I have read have been the paucity of knowledge of musical theory on the part of most of the participants. Now, I am not a huge defender of rock and roll, although I appreciate a lot of it. My own tastes in music are varied, but tend towards jazz (all periods) and classical (all of it, but with more emphasis on baroque and modernist music than anything else) with major parts of my musical interests lying in European and American folk music, Mexican music, and Asian music. I have more than enough gripes with rock, especially in its current state, and I will get to those in due time (a lot of what was to have gone in the Friday Afternoon Sermon is on this very topic).

We need to clarify some concepts before we can get anywhere. I often hear the ill-informed argument that whatever music the arguer is arguing against is dissonant and the music that the arguer is championing is not. So let us begin with an understanding of what dissonance is.

I was shocked to have a conversation recently with an educated, thoughtful person who thought that dissonance was a Romantic innovation in music, and that it was not to be found in the music of Mozart, Bach, etc. I realized that people confuse dissonance with density, with resolution, and even with rhythm. Dissonance is a technical term describing certain relationships between simultaneously sounded pitches (for now we will ignore the implied harmonies between pitches sounded in a close time period, but not simultaneously, as that is an extremely complex matter). I will not alienate the musical layman with excessive mathematics, as this debate belongs in the public forum, and excessive mathematics will only keep the topic relevant to specialists.

The important thing for the layman to understand is that dissonance and consonance are relative terms. There are strong dissonances (for instance the minor second) and weak dissonances (the minor seventh), and there are dissonances that are only dissonant depending on context (the perfect fourth). Similarly, we find consonance to be in a spectrum from the most consonant (unison) to weaker consonances (sixths and thirds) to our old friend the perfect fourth, which, depending on the harmonic setting around its occurrence, can be dissonant or consonant.

I realize that I have probably lost many of my readers, but it is important to note that if one is going to participate in this debate, this level of understanding is probably the bare minimum. It can be learned by anyone who is not tone deaf in a week or two of serious reading, especially with ready access to a keyboard instrument. Please note that dissonance is almost completely unrelated to density (the number of notes played simultaneously (vertical density) or played in the space of a short amount of time (horizontal density)). It is unrelated to rhythm (at least for this level of discussion – for those who are familiar with the four criteria of electronic music proprosed by Karlheinz Stockhausen there are some interesting parallels, which we will ignore right now). Dissonance is sort of related to timbre, but can be isolated from it for the purpose of our discussion.

Now, the reason I have gone so much into dissonance is that the item that inspired me to write was a preposterous study cited on another blog that had to do with the physiology of plants when exposed to different kinds of music. This “study” (I use scare quotes, because this study had to have had such predetermined conclusions as to be completely laughable) determined that plants atrophied and died when exposed to a diet of rock and roll, lived but did not thrive on a diet of Schoenberg and Webern, and thrived moderately on Brahms and Beethoven, and thrived admirably on a diet of Mozart. Anyone with even a basic understanding of harmony will immediately smell a rat here.

Before we look at the absurdity of the system of classification of music listed here, let us poke at the bigger absurdity of using plants as the guide to moral content in music. Music is an activity of people, for people. Plants do not have ears, nor brains. If we are to decide how to live our lives based on the vitality of plant growth, we had better get used to compost and water for breakfast. I wonder if the authors of this study will next do a project reading various poetry to the plants. Naturally the poor dandelions listening to Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Elliot will fare much worse than the ones listening to Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, and, to a lesser degree, John Milton.

Let us start with rock and roll. Rock and roll, of all the music cited here, is the least dissonant. The harmonies are almost exclusively consonant (and Major triadic for the most part). Dissonance plays a part only in passing, as it did in Medieval music. Otherwise, rock and roll is, for the most part, “Louie Louie.” The simplified blues progression is a pattern of tonic triad, dominant triad, and subdominant triad. Sometimes the music is in minor key, but the basic structure of all of these chords is third, third, fifth (the relationship between the root and third, third and fifth, and root and fifth). Most rock guitarists I have known can barely make a seventh chord, let alone use one in their music, thus excluding the tritone and the seventh, two dissonances that virtually govern all functional harmony tonal music. In the most obnoxious rock and roll, the third is often omitted, making the sole harmony a Perfect Fifth (second in consonance only to the unison/octave).

Not all rock and roll is this simplistic, for instance, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, David Bowie, and many others have expanded the harmonies of rock and roll to the levels of, well, maybe Tchaikovsky. Unless we are talking Velvet Underground or some of the psychedelic stuff, we are pretty much in the range of Common Practice music (although the treatment of the subdominant and dominant relationship is different, based on the blues and there are some drone dissonances, coming from Appalachian roots, but those are always passing dissonances, used exactly as they are in country banjo, bagpipe, and some baroque music).

Certainly the timbre of rock can be more jarring than a wind quintet, but that is a grave generalization. Are we talking Jerry Lee Lewis, Led Zeppelin, or Duran Duran? Did this “experiment” use the same song, played in different styles as a control (for instance, “Good Times, Bad Times” played by Led Zeppelin, arranged for string quartet, orchestrated by Andre Previn, etc.)? Did it account for volume (perhaps extremely loud sounds could damage plants, but we would have to have consistent dynamics between study groups).

This leaves rhythm, which is a bit more of a distinguishing factor in defining rock and roll, although when we look at “Love me Tender” and “My Hot Rod Ford” we are clearly dealing with major differences. I have heard arguments about how the rhythm of rock and roll is inherently immoral, but those are usually based on some balderdash about “reversing the natural rhythm of the heartbeat” or some such silliness.

So, let’s call rock and roll mostly consonant, with varied timbre and rhythm and turn towards Schoenberg and Webern.

First, the only thing that Schoenberg and Webern really had in common was the use of the twelve tone system to govern structure, and even then, much of Schoenberg’s atonal music (and all of his great works) are outside of that system, and Webern cheated much of the time. Schoenberg’s music was lush, orchestrated in the Viennese style, and built on the notion of many variations on a theme. Webern’s music is almost diametrically opposite: controlled, sparse, often written for small ensembles. They both used ample dissonance, but treated it in different manners. In terms of timbre, Schoenberg was a Romantic, closer to Schubert than anyone, and Webern was Classical, writing with the intimacy of Mozart’s chamber music as a closer model. Neither composer wrote entirely in dissonance. However, of the examples given, these two are certainly the most dissonant, so we will leave it at that. Rhythmically they were no farther out than any other classical composer.

Dealing with Brahms and Beethoven is a little bit trickier, because we have to ask which periods, which pieces, etc. A middle string quartet of Beethoven is a wildly different animal than his Ninth Symphony. His early works are extremely close to Haydn and Mozart. He wrote one piece, “Die Grosse Fuge” that sounds startlingly modern in terms of dissonance resolution, but it remains a formal fugue. Overall, if we were to go about the ponderous task of making a statistical analysis of the amount of dissonance in Beethoven, we would not find much different than in most of Mozart (who could write jarring, dissonant music with bizarre resolutions with the best of them – the final act of Don Giovanni comes to mind). Technically speaking Mozart was the superior composer, but since most people do not know this, I find it difficult to believe that plants would respond in their growth to this.

I will mostly ignore Brahms, because I have found that Tchaikovsky said it best when he called him “a giftless bastard,” and ignoring Brahms’s music is much more enjoyable than listening to it (although even here, I love the Liebeslieder Walzer, the Doppelkonzert, and the Deutsches Requiem). Basically all one needs to know is that, in spite of Schoenbergs essay “Brahms the Revolutionary,” Brahms was conservative, and his music is really not that “out there” at all.

So, this leaves us with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of two perfect composers (the other was Chopin). His voice leading was perfect, his sense of balance, his thorough achievement of diversity in unity beyond compare. Perhaps the cells of the plants could sense this (I would like a botanical explanation of how this works, however, especially given how well plants do in my noisy East Oakland quasi-ghetto neighborhood), but I doubt it. The thing to remember is that each one of the traits that bugs cultural conservatives in the other music, is found in spades in Mozart. Certainly one can argue that the differentiation is in the balance Mozart found between these elements, but we need some specifics (and we need to stop excluding Haydn from the equation, because Haydn achieved undeniable greatness with some really strange structural choices – in fact, if we are to take Brahms as a revolutionary, we must see Haydn as a frothing at the mouth anarchist).

The whole notion of counting dissonances reminds me of an equally laughable article in an otherwise good magazine by some dunce who was a philosophy major at TAC and later a grad student in music at CSU Northridge. This poor fellow, using a remarkably poor reading of the Angelic Doctor, determined that the more dissonant the music was, the more immoral it was. By his own argument, we would have to accept John Tesh or George Winston as the summum ad bonum of music. I hope the poor bunny grew out of it when he got through grad school.

We can certainly make some arguments about the emotional and moral affects of music, but without a thorough grounding in music theory and history, we will end up as nothing more than hack botanists (which might be a step better than the Bulgarian “scientists” in the 1960’s, who, determined to prove how bad everything Western was, “proved” that rock music caused homosexuality in mice). I would suggest that anyone wanting to talk about the morality inherent to rock and roll first get his music theory, history, and even ethnomusicology up to an acceptable level of competence. I would also advise leaving Plato on the bookshelf, as his conclusions about music fall apart completely whenever they are applied to concrete examples (as is often a problem with Plato).

The debate needs to focus on how music acts on people, and it must keep in mind the difference between the music itself and the morality of the composer and the difference between the music and the venues the music is performed in. Pointing to the lifestyle of Boy George to damn the music of the Culture Club becomes problematic when looking at Mozart. Blaming the music of the Grateful Dead on the lifestyle of many deadheads becomes problematic when one realizes that much of the Dead’s music is really country-folk (I saw shows of theirs that were almost entirely acoustic folk).

Now, let some meaty debate begin!

Posted by erik at May 3, 2003 12:57 AM | TrackBack