From: abrocke1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Aaron Brockett)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Help Required. Dodecacophony. ;-)
Date: 11 Nov 92 04:23:09 GMT
Organization: Swarthmore College

In article <1992Nov8.054003.14240@Princeton.EDU>, roger@crux.Princeton.EDU
(Roger Lustig) writes:
> 
> In article <1992Nov7.211719.18280@dartvax.dartmouth.edu> Joseph.J.Marcheso.Jr.@dartmouth.edu (Joseph J. Marcheso Jr.) writes:
> >In article <1992Nov5.225459.3425@nuscc.nus.sg>
> >smoliar@argon.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:
> 

lots of stuff deleted
> 
> >The argument that people don't like it because they don't have a lot of
> >knowledge about the music is silly. Music is primarily an emotional
> >medium where the listener FEELS it's expressiveness. If atonal music
> >needs to be listened to with a manual to fully enjoy its work (and
> >sufficiently praise its creator) than it ceases to be an emotional
> >medium. 
> 
> True but irrelevant.  Perhaps the music wasn't *written* for everyone!
> Perhaps it was written for people who HAD taken the time to get to know
> a lot of music quite intimately (I'm talking about the repertoire from
> Bach through Brahms) and thought about the musical possibilities opened
> up over the centuries.  Perhaps the music was written for people who
> don't just like to sit back and "let the music wash over you" (George
> Axelrod).  Perhaps the music presupposes listeners who want to engage
> themselves actively with the music, perhaps hear it several times,
> perhaps study it a bit, and THUS achieve a state of mind in which the
> emotional appeal of the music becomes apparent.
> 
> I might point out that, to perhaps 95% of American listeners, Rigoletto
> and Otello and Meistersinger are basically pleasant noise that 
> doesn't tell them much at all or move them emotionally at all.  How 
> does one get to a condition in which one can appreciate the emotional 
> value of these pieces?  By just the things you deplore: acquiring 
> knowledge about them.  By learning the tunes.  The stories.  By learning
> about the composers and the things the composers cared about, not least
> their respective homelands.  
> 
more stuff deleted
> 
> Now, are you "raptured" by, say, the Missa Pange Lingua of Josquin or
> the motets of Guillaume de Machaut?  Why not?  Is this bad music?  Or
> do you simply lack the knowledge, the exposure, the interest in the
> why and the wherefore of the music? 
> 
> > Never in History has the weight of enjoyment been placed so much on
> >the listener and the responsibility removed from the composer. If
> 
> Bullshit.  Considering the extent to which composers go out on a limb
> merely to compose, this statement is laughable.  As for responsibility being
> placed on the listener, so what?  Perhaps some listeners *want* to take
> on some responsibility.  (Note also that in this century listeners 
> have become more and more irresponsible, i.e., lazy, and not even bothered to
> get to know the thousands of easy-to-listen-to pieces ritten in their
> times, preferring the old warhorses time and again.)
> 
> >knowledge continues to be a criterion 
> 
> Knowledge has *always* been a criterion.  Only in the mid-to-late
> 19th C was the basic listening public for what we consider the "Classics"
> anything other than a tiny, elite minority.  Most Europeans of Mozart's
> day never heard a note of his music.
> 
> >then the only people who will
> >listen (or care to) will be other musicians and then this art will be
> >firmly out of the realm of the average audience. 
> 
> As has always been the case.  The average audience has *never* cared
> much for the most advanced music.
> 
> >btw if you look at
> >music from broadway to R&B to Pop to heavy metal to Christian rock to
> >Country etc,etc you'll see that they're ALL tonal music and the
> >audience (those blissfully ignorant babes in wonderland) continue to
> >find it interesting and exciting and keep coming back for more. 
> 
> No doubt for the musical qualities.  I'm sure the colorful harmonies
> of the Nashville sound fascinate you endlessly.  
> 
> This is your silliest and most irrelevant statement yet.  How much of
> this music is listened to for its musical qualities?  People who like
> melody and harmony -- or even the interesting interplay of words and
> their settings -- soon grow tired of most of the genres you list above.
> Or, if they don't, they don't listen to them in order to appreciate those
> things.  I like R&B, but I wouldn't want to go to a quiet, sit-down 
> concert of it.  Would you?  No.  You'd want to dance to it.  The music,
> and to some extent the words, aren't particularly important.  (The
> performance is generally more important than what's being performed, 
> especially with Heavy Metal.)
> 
> >P.S. I find it perfectly dreadful :-)
> 
> Then you're a damn fool.  Or you just don't know how to listen to
> those genres.
> 
> (Hint: it takes some exposure and knowledge.  These are obtained, as
> with any music, not through book learning, but through acculturation.) 
> >Hummmmmm, 
> I'll fake the rest. 
> Roger
> 

I should know better than to take on Roger, but here goes :) 

  Roger, pardon me if I'm missing your point, but you seem to be saying
that 
the difficulties that modern audiences encounter when listening to 
contemporary music are not qualitatively different from those  
encountered by audiences in the past.
   I think this simply isn't true. An average listener from Verdi's 
time who heard Rigoletto out of context might have perceived it
as merely pleasant noise, but that's quite different from an 
average modern listener who hears Ralph Shapey's latest piece as 
_unpleasant_ noise. Verdi's audience (or Liszt's or Brahms' or 
whoever's) might not have been familiar with the _particular_ 
use of harmony in a piece, but the fundamental language it was 
written in would have been easily recognizable. The problem is 
that the basic musical language of today's listeners' is not much 
different from that of audiences in the nineteenth century. We grew up on
Greensleeves and Silent Night and most of us spent a good amount 
of time listening to pop music at some point--almost all of the 
music in our environment (barring the occassional film score, etc) 
is firmly tonal. Our very speech patterns are simply arpeggios of 
a triad with an occassional seventh thrown in! What we are conditioned 
to hear, from birth, is tonal music. Even those of us who get some
amount of music education merely have the same patterns hammered in. 
My school, Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college with (I believe) 
a very good music department, offers five semesters of 
theory which don't take students past the earliest works of 
Stravinsky. Thus even someone with a B.A. in music might have 
almost no exposure to works which aren't primarily tonal.

Thus I feel that there very much is a greater challenge to the 
audiences of today when confronted by modern music. Now, having gone 
through all that, let me say that I feel that much of atonal music
is wonderful; it's just much less intuitive. Listeners in the last
century had to do some work in order to fully understand the music 
of their time (or of any time, for that matter; Josquin is a good
example) and we should expect to do the same. However, much music of this 
century also requires, I feel, an extensive retraining of the ear 
in order to appreciate it. This is the burden that many modern listeners
are unwilling to undergo. It is difficult, but I personally feel that 
it's quite an adventure.

--Aaron Brockett