Extracts from THE REBIRTH OF MUSIC

 
What is classical music? - music whose subject is its self reference.

The essential component that makes this great tradition unique is its notation.

Western classical music alone developed written notation.

It is the only music of the world which is written down.

This extraordinary but simple device put into the hands of musicians the possibility to make a music, at once structured, extended, precise, complex , but also leaving enough freedom for its re creators , the performers , to bring their own creative powers of interpretation to each performance , so that no two performances of a work will ever be identical , thus ensuring perpetual renewal of the musical score provided by the composer.

The combined effect of a notated music that nevertheless is endlessly varied with every performance has led to this vast body of works from the last centuries – the Western classical tradition.

These works comprise arguably the greatest music in the world, and certainly represent a musical form with limitless expressive potential, which is able to command sentiments which pop and rock music cannot ever do, however great those forms are in their own right, because they do not possess the breadth and depth and scope of structure of classical forms.

Notation gives classical music the great power to become self referential, allowing composers to relate every aspect of a work to itself from beginning to end.

It is this self reference that defines a work of music as classical.

Of course you find self reference in all sorts of music.

But once the subject of a work has become its self reference, it is classical, in whatever style, of whatever period.

Music defines itself as ‘ classical ‘ when its subject is self reference.

And only notation made this formal level of self reference possible.

No other world music has at its command this extraordinary degree of formal control.

This is why it would be so great a loss to the world if artists were no longer to enrich this ‘classical’ tradition with works of equivalent appeal and power as those of the past, and why we should all be concerned for its survival.

Yet that survival is now in question.

Paradoxically, it is the system of notation itself that, in the hands of atonalists , has led to the current crisis.

A hundred years ago an experiment began amongst classical composers to radicalize their language. The result was atonalism, or twelve note music, using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale organized in a ‘note row’ by the composer -the so called ‘twelve note row’ - instead of the traditional scale. As this experiment began to take hold and dominate the work of new composers, Schoenberg , Webern and Berg amongst them , so contact with the greater audience for music was lost , despite all three being composers of prodigious talents.

The resultant music was unmelodious, discordant and arhythmic.

This experiment has led to a catastrophe for classical music.

Audiences have voted with their feet, or their ears.

They do not like atonal music, devoid of melody, harmony, or rhythm with which they can identify.

But atonalism , directly or indirectly , has dominated new ‘classical’ music , for the last hundred years , and the atonal establishment control the culture. Now, unbelievably one hundred years later, atonalism and its after effects still presides over the so called new classical culture, or what is left of it, finally a bedraggled remnant, culturally irrelevant to the world.

Tonal composers of new classical music have been all but destroyed, the classical tradition is therefore not being renewed and faces death.

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Tonality releases the expressive power of dissonance.

We normally think of tonality in music as our system of keys, C major G major, D major, A minor and so on. But I am suggesting a much broader definition for tonality, or, if you like, a more comprehensive one.

I have implied for tonality the template of ‘ pattern’.

Using that as the model, dissonance is then any disturbance to the pattern. It is this disturbance of pattern, or dissonance, that creates expressive or emotional power in music.

Tonality releases the expressive power of dissonance.

Music itself is inseparable from the tension between consonance and dissonance. Music takes place when that tension is evoked.

The tension between consonance and dissonance is the divine domain of music.

But without pattern there can be no deviance, without symmetry no asymmetry.

Atonalism is uniformly asymmetric music, all dissonance.

As the power of music lies precisely in the tension between consonance and dissonance, music which is all dissonance –atonalism - loses all tension and therefore all expressivity.

Tonality provides pattern, from which deviation can then take place.

The opening of Wagner’s opera Rhinegold provides a beautiful illustration.

For many bars Wagner sets up an almost static pattern of E flat major in the orchestral introduction. He builds this key up in rising arpeggiations for bar after bar. Just as the ear might have begun to rebel, the pattern is disturbed as, finally, we are released into the opera, the spell is broken and the music freed into flowing and changing harmonies. This moment of release is one of the most startling in music. It is the release however, not the endless bars of E flat which makes the introduction so extraordinary in effect .A powerful pattern was set up. But it was set up only in order to be broken, and it is at the moment of its breaking that the surging power of the opening is released.

Let us re embrace this natural home of music in the patterns of tonality. Let us love again the infinite designs which our creative minds can limitlessly explore if we re inhabit this true sea of all music.

For it is in the magnificent symmetries of music that the genius of composition resides. From within that repose the composer’s mind then freely plays upon the music’s patterns and toys with his listeners emotions according to the subtlety and surprise with which he deviates from his own design.

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Tonality and the Harmonic Series , the infinite sea of all music.

Tonality represents pattern in sound.

In pitches, in the west, this has come to mean the major and minor scales and the modes. On the one hand these seem a man made tool, and in other words could be different, a random man made device. But when you listen to other musics from around the world what strikes you with force is the similarity of their scales to our major and minor scales, not their difference. This comes as a shock to discover when you have spent your whole life listening with Schoenberg’s ears (whether you knew you were or not). You would expect to find huge differences if western tonality was, as he taught, just a finite limited period of style, a random system, if you like, for ordering pitches, which served a useful expressive purpose for a few hundred years and then by 1900 was over.

But in fact the music of India and Africa and Asia and America is fantastically close to western tonality in its scalic intervals. It is melodious, harmonious, singable, humable and memorable and wonderfully rhythmic in the periodic (regular) beats so avoided in atonalism.

It is atonalism that was the aberration in the world’s music and not tonality.

This was because atonalism was not music at all – it was numbers organized from the way we write music down, undirected by the ear.

All human music directed by the ear, which is to say all music except atonalism, is tonal. The melody and pitch pattern, the scales and harmonies of the world’s innumerable musics are amazingly close to our major and minor scales.

What unites western tonal music and all other musics is far more strong than the differences.

Listen at random to any world musics and you will instantly hear what I mean. Imagine for what you are hearing a key, and it will fit. Sing back the melodic fragments and they are tonal melody, as you may find in any western music from as far back as you can go.

Could there be an underlying principle that unites all music?

There almost certainly is, and its source is the harmonic series, a law of nature.

The harmonic series is the structure of harmonics or overtones that sound above a note, some audibly, some inaudibly. In other words play any note on the piano and above the audible pitch is vibrating first a pitch at the octave above the note struck -–or the fundamental as it is called – then above the octave a fifth, a forth, a major third, a minor third, a major second, then minor second, then decreasing intervals. This forms a spectrum of sound which influences the way we hear the fundamental note.

It represents an unchanging symmetry in the natural structure of sound.

And this symmetrical pattern of the first harmonics above the fundamental forms the consonant basis of all music. The chord , if you play it , of the first seven harmonics is a beautiful harmonious sound.

It is from this innately pleasing consonant and symmetrical basis that all music springs.

It is the constant in nature to which the human ear has responded from the beginning of time to make music, and no doubt will go on doing to the end of time, a template against which all music sounds.

(As this relates to a physical law of nature, the mathematically harmonious and symmetrical vibration of overtones, it is possible to imagine that these same principles would apply equally on another world as here on Earth).

Of course there is an interaction between the ear and the natural vibrating frequencies of sound. Evolution has equipped us to respond to this structure and the physiology of our ears can detect it and therefore any deviation from it.

Thus we detect consonance and dissonance and, as I have already suggested, the interaction between consonance and dissonance is the affective force of all music.

Our ears choose to distinguish pitch variation to the division approximately of what we in the west call the semitone. Below that pitch variation becomes less discernible and less affective therefore. That is not to say that smaller variation cannot work. Smaller intervals towards the quarter tone are often found in other cultures and we use it in western music as well, instinctively inflecting pitches with minute expressive variation.

However, the examples, which in the Schoenbergian world view, would be expected to be found, of exotic alien musics , made up of tiny intervals and weird scales , is simply not there. He said we should now explore the upper harmonics, higher up the harmonic series into the semitones and smaller. But this micro tonal music has never worked in the west because the ear is unimpressed by such tiny pitch division and, contrary to myth, does not exist anywhere in the world naturally, other than as expressive inflection around larger pitch divisions.

The whole world’ s music is a result of the interaction between two great constants; the harmonic series structure of overtones in nature on the one hand, and the psycho – physiological response system to it of the human ear and brain on the other.

The result of the interface between these two great constants is a music of humanity the world over which is tonal, which corresponds closely with our major and minor scales.

Tonality is not local, it is universal.

Tonality is the universal alphabet of music.

 

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All music is tonal.

In fact even atonal music is tonal.

It is possible to understand this upon the basis that music is a heard phenomenon, not a written one. Western music devised the writing down of music, to better organize the heard structure. But when atonalists became more interested in the numerical patterns of written notation than the heard, the disaster of twentieth century atonalism followed.

But the peculiar fact is that music is only perceived as music when the ear and brain convert even the atonal intentions of an atonal composer into tonality.

Indeed, the method by which the brain understands it is hearing sounds organized with a musical intention, rather then random noises of everyday life, is by successfully detecting within the heard sounds the patterns of tonality, primarily a perception of pitch organization. If the ear hears sounds – and all sounds have a pitch and are potential musical material – but does NOT detect tonal organization, then the brain assumes it is hearing ‘ noise’ or sound either without organization, or without organization that the mind would suspect of having the intention of giving musical pleasure or interest.

Tonality defines sound as music.

All music is tonal.

Hence the often heard comment about a piece of atonal music that it is ‘ just noise ‘. That is in fact exactly what it is, because the brain simply cannot perceive atonalism as music.

If it is perceived as music then something else must be happening within the mechanism of perception.

In order to hear so called atonal music as music, the mind HAS to convert it to tonality. It can be perceived as music only if the mind can find within its structures the implication at least of tonal pattern,as it is by finding tonal pattern within sound that we know we are hearing music.

This tells us something profoundly revealing about the whole nature of music:

that music occurs only when the mind searches for and finds tonal pattern.

 

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