From: smoliar@argon.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Subject: Re: Help Required. Dodecacophony. ;-)
Reply-To: smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Organization: Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 22:54:59 GMT

In article <1992Nov5.121516.17136@husc3.harvard.edu>
elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) writes:
>In article <1992Nov3.043025.28103@credence.com>
>jeffw@or.credence.com (Jeff Winslow) writes:
>
>:In article <1992Oct30.175337.16944@husc3.harvard.edu>
>:elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) writes:
>:
>:>and most listeners have not tired of the cornucopia of tonal music of this
>:>and previous centuries.  
>:
>:Oh to be a babe in wonderland. Nice for them. What about the rest of us? 
>
>Come now --- were all musicians and listeners before c.1900
>"babes in wonderland"?  Or do you suppose that all sophisticated
>musicians of that time suffered for lack of atonal music?  Or
>if not, that their 20th century counterparts must be bored
>with tonal music only because atonal music is now also available?
>
Noam, in case you haven't noticed, it's not the nineteenth century any more
(and it won't be the twentieth for much longer)!  Musicians and listeners today
carry around all sorts of contextual baggage which were just inconceivable in
the preceding century.  Most important is probably the great abundance of
resources for hearing music.  (Brahms never had to content with music being
pumped into his elevator.)  Couple that with the greater abundance of general
sounds which we take for granted as part of our ambient environment.  It is not
at all absurd to say that we just do not hear things (ANY things) the way they
did a hundred years ago.  The "babes in wonderland" are not the people of the
nineteenth century;  they are the people of the twentieth century who would
retreat to nineteenth-century standards.

Of course they had their own problems a hundred years ago.  Brahms may have
articulated the problem of composing beneath the shadow of Beethoven, erected
as a genius by his society;  but everyone else was worrying about the same
problem.  (Beethoven was luckier.  The "cult of genius" had not caught on
in his time.  He just had to worry about making a living.)  So what they
suffered in the last century was not the lack of atonal music but that same
plague of societal critics who wanted to turn back the clock to a simpler time
when people listened to music they could understand.  (They did not have
Slonimsky around to inform them that their argument was specious.  Their
admirable predecessors found Beethoven hard to listen to, too, just as they
found "too many notes" in Mozart.)

I do not think there are many of us around who are now bored with tonal music.
We ARE bored with cliches which get worked to death in music which seems to be
churned out by the yard.  Some of those cliches are the same ones that Max
Steiner made a living from with his film scores, so there is certainly plenty
of boring tonality around.  Others are special effects with electronic
instruments which get rediscovered by every new rock band and pushed off
as some profound new sound.  Not all of those are atonal, but many of them
are.  Finally, I think any International Computer Music Association member
would be willing to admit that even some of the most intense acts of
composition involving computers can come out sounding like yet another
bag of cliches.  When there are cliches wherever you turn, it can be very
relieving to hear a good primal scream come out of a tone row;  but it can
also be relieving to hear a new way to play a triad!
-- 
Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical