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by Miles Hoffman condensed from an article called "Music Without Magic" Miles Hoffman is violist and artistic director of the American Chamber Players, and music commentator for NPR's Morning Edition. We can understand these powers as they relate to two basic fundamentals of our lives: loneliness and the search for meaning. Silence is a metaphor for loneliness: It's a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence by occupying our senses - and thus, our minds and our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. Sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, then, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us. One way we are comforted when we're lonely is to feel that at least someone understands us, knows what we're going through. When we feel the sympathy of others, and especially when we feel empathy, we experience companionship - we no longer feel entirely alone. And strangely enough, music can provide empathy. The structure of music, its essential nature - with many simultaneous, complex, overlapping and interweaving elements is an exact mirror of the psyche, of the complex and interwoven structure of our emotions. This makes it a perfect template onto which we can project our emotions. And when we make that projection, we hear our own emotions in the music - or images and memories of our emotions - reflected back. And because the reflection is so accurate, we feel understood. We feel recognized. Yes, it's a kind of illusion, but it's a beautiful one, and very comforting. We all share the same kinds of emotions. We all know love and loss and longing, and in different measure we all know joy and despair. We're linked with the composer of the music by our common humanity. And if a composer has found a compelling way to express his own emotions, then to a certain extent that composer can't really avoid expressing, and touching, ours as well. Not to be forgotten among these psychological considerations is how the sheer beauty of music lifts us up and gives us hope, reminding us in our darkest moments, in our "gray hours," that life itself can still hold wonderous beauty. Furthermore, the very "movement" of music, its rhythmic movement through time, carries inevitable associations with life, with positive forces and feelings. Life is movement and movement is life, and joyous music can literally get us moving again when we've been stunned or stilled by sadness. Did I say "movement through time"? Ah, time. It passes in music. But not without purpose, not without reasons, not without . . . meaning. And that's just the point: Music gives meaning to time. If all those overlapping and interweaving elements and events in a piece of music indeed mean something, if they remind, reflect, comfort, inspire, or excite - then by definition the time it takes for them to do all that means something too. When I played in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., years ago, I used to have a regular little joke. Before we began a lengthy symphony, I'd turn to my colleague on stage and say, "See you in 45 minutes." A piece of music must take a certain amount of time; there's no way around it. And though it may be just a self-contained fragment of time, a little world of its own, within that fragment time is used, arranged, and manipulated so that the passage of time makes sense. I have a friend who's fond of saying that it took a thousand years to invent the C major chord. The system of writing music in clearly defined major and minor keys is called tonality, or "tonal harmony," and music written in that system is called "tonal music." We know that from the beginnings of Gregorian chant, somewhere around a.d. 600, it did indeed take about a thousand years for tonality to evolve and find general acceptance. By 1700, it had reached a position of unchallenged primacy in Western music. So what does it mean for a piece to be "in a key"? Well, when a piece of music is in the key of C major, for example, it means that the C major chord, in all of it manifestations, functions as the harmonic center of gravity. As the music progresses, it will normally traverse any number of other harmonies. These various harmonies don't just follow each other randomly: Their progressions are orderly, even when the rules are stretched to the breaking point. And the most important aspect of these progressions - in fact, the defining aspect of all tonal music - is that dissonant chords, those that contain jarring or unsettling sounds, always eventually lead to consonant chords that "please the ear." Let me emphasize immediately that the pleasing qualities of consonant chords and intervals, and the power of tonal relationships in general, are not arbitrary constructs. They are firmly rooted in the laws of acoustical physics with their frequency ratios and a natural phenomenon called the harmonic series (or overtone series). Or to put it another way, the origins of tonality lie not in a set of inventions and decisions but in the fundamental nature of sound. To be clear: Tonal music contains lots of dissonance. If you were to string together all the dissonant chords in a piece by Bach (or Schubert or Tchaikovsky or any other composer of tonal music) with no other chords between, the effect would loosen your fillings. But the dissonances in tonal music are never strung together that way, because the function of dissonance is to provide tension, and that tension is always resolved by a return to consonance. Indeed, the true genius of the tonal system is in how composers can use these harmonic progressions to create a dramatic narrative full of conflict, tension, uncertainty, and ultimate resolution. For more than 300 years, this remarkable system of pleasing sounds and striking contrasts, within clear relationships and patterns, has been the unquestioned foundation of Western music. Countless composers of every conceivable style have shared the basic framework of tonality; they have spoken a common musical language. Somewhere in the early 20th century, the basic framework of tonality was still in place, but by this time its boundaries had been significently stretched. This expansion of tonality's limits was so extensive that some people thought its usefulness was nearing exhaustion. The foundation was crumbling fast, according to this particular theory of music history which is still current. But was it really? In listing composers whose music sits comfortably in a tonal framework, I could include any number of extraordinary composers whose careers extended well into the 20th century - and, in some cases, well beyond the century's midpoint. I might start with Jean Sibelius and Sergei Rachmaninoff and continue with Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok, Ernest Bloch, Leos Janacek, Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, Bohuslav Martinu, Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Leonard Bernstein. Not a bad list, and it's by no means complete. These composers are among the greatest, most revered musical figures of the 20th century, and they simply don't fit the theory. If tonality was on its last legs, somebody must have forgotten to tell them. However, another composer made quite an impact in the early 20th century, and his name was Arnold Schoenberg. Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg was at first an exponent of the expansionist, superheated style of late 19th-century Romanticism. But by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he was on his way to a dramatic renunciation of tonality that included a complete rejection of consonant harmonies and a happy embrace of dissonance. And by the early 1920s, he had introduced a novel way of composing that came to be known as the "12-tone" method. In 12-tone music, the composer orders the 12 tones of the chromatic scale (the scale on the piano that includes all the keys, black and white, within any one octave) into a series of his choosing called a "tone row," and that row - in place of traditional scales, harmonies, and harmonic progressions - functions in complex ways as the basis for all the musical elements of the piece. Twelve-tone music (also called "serial" music) is by definition "atonal": It's not in a key, and it doesn't depend on consonant harmonies to provide stability or resolve tension. In theory, the point of 12-tone music is not that dissonance is good and consonance is bad, but rather that they're both irrelevant. In practice, however, Schoenberg's 12-tone works were strikingly dissonant. He claimed to have "liberated" dissonance. However, there are some who would say that, far from liberating dissonance - a liberation whose necessity was by no means widely acknowledged - Schoenberg's system led, rather, to a tyranny of dissonance. The serial music of Schoenberg became enormously influential, in ways that had nothing to do with its general acceptance or popularity. This influence came about through his own tireless efforts as a teacher and musical zealot, through the philosophical efforts of various musicians, writers, and critics, and through a strange and complicated confluence of aesthetics and politics, especially after World War II. As for the works themselves, they were controversial from the start, to put it mildly. They were critically reviled, and to this day have never been anywhere close to popularity. But Schoenberg's serialism led ultimately to a 50-year modernist reign over Western classical music, a reign in which to have any hope of being taken seriously by the critics and academic types, composers were obligated, regardless of their specific styles and techniques, to avoid traditional tonal procedures and the comforts of consonance and to accept that dissonance was king. Now, it's true that we often add salt and hot spices to our food to enhance its flavor and heighten contrasts, and it's important to remember that some people like their food much hotter and spicier than others. It's true as well that harsh elements can be a tool of great visual art, and that much great literature makes use of disturbing images or harrowing episodes, or both. But is there a chef on the planet who suggests swallowing a tablespoon of salt for an appetizer and following it with a bowl of Tabasco sauce for an entree before washing it all down with a cup of vinegar? We know from listening to tonal music that dissonance can be wonderfully useful when it's employed imaginatively. It can enhance and even create meaning. But in and of itself, dissonance is something that people fundamentally don't like - that's its very definition. When composers nonetheless demand that their listeners endure dissonance at great length and without letup, it's hard not to see that demand as something spiteful, stubbornly aggressive, even hostile. The primary defense of relentlessly dissonant and persistently unpopular avant-garde music has always been that, through exposure and familiarity, we often come to appreciate, and even love, things that initially confuse or displease us. Here what we might call "the Beethoven Myth" comes into play. "Beethoven was misunderstood in his time," the argument goes, "but now the whole world recognizes his genius. I am misunderstood in my time, therefore I am like Beethoven." This reasoning, unfortunately, has been the refuge of countless second- and third-rate talents. Beethoven ate fish, too. If you eat fish, are you like Beethoven? But there's a much graver flaw in the argument: Beethoven was not misunderstood in his time. Beethoven was without doubt the most famous composer in the world in his time, and the most admired. And if there were those who didn't "get" his late string quartets, for example, there were plenty of others who did, and who rapidly accepted the quartets as masterpieces. In fact, the notion that great geniuses in the history of music went unrecognized during their lifetimes is almost entirely false. It's difficult to find an example of a piece we now consider a masterpiece that was not appreciated as such either while its composer was alive or within a relatively short period after his death. "But there was a riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring!" Yes, that was at the premiere, in Paris in May 1913. But the Rite was performed again almost immediately, without riots, in Paris and London, and quickly acquired its stature as perhaps the most celebrated and influential piece of the 20th century. It has since been performed and recorded more times than anyone could possibly count. Still, tastes do evolve, and we're reminded that people who as children eat and drink only Velveeta and soda pop often later develop a taste for Camembert and cognac. That's fine, even if it may be a little on the generous side to use "Camembert and cognac" as analogues for unpleasant sounds. But I'm afraid the "lesson" has usually been reinforced with large doses of intellectual condescension and intimidation. While much of the public would be perfectly willing to acknowledge that Camembert and cognac can be wonderful in small amounts, what we've heard from the avant-garde establishment for years has been something like this: "Yes, we know from centuries of experience that most people find a steady diet of nothing but Camembert and cognac unappealing. And that will never change. Nonetheless, we are going to feed you . . . a steady diet of nothing but Camembert and cognac. We don't care if you find it unappetizing, because we've decided that this is necessary; it represents Progress. And if you can't accept this Progress, it's only because you're not knowledgeable or sophisticated enough to understand and appreciate it." If the joy and comfort of beautiful sounds were the only things we sought in music, the domination of dissonance would be the only problem we have with avant-garde music. But we're also burdened by our need for music to make sense, our fundamental quest for meaning. Psychiatrist Anthony Reading, in his book Hope and Despair, writes: "Before we can process and store the input our senses receive, we first have to distinguish meaningful signals from meaningless noise. Detecting information involves perceiving recurrent patterns in data, deviations from apparent randomness."Reading emphasizes that "information is contained in the way objects are arranged within a system, not in the objects themselves". To be fair, many modernist composers arrange the musical objects - notes, chords, rhythms - with extraordinary care, and sometimes with dazzling intellectual complexity. as no patterns at all. But the catch is that for the arrangements to convey "information," or to be meaningful, we have to be able to perceive it: Unrecognizable or imperceptible patterns are the same as no patterns at all. And without patterns we lose our bearings. We're not sure where we are or where we've been, and therefore we have little interest in where we might be going. This is where Schoenberg himself so often failed, and where others have most grievously failed. They have either grossly overestimated or willfully ignored the limits of what most listeners can perceive, and somewhere along the way they have either forgotten or willfully ignored the reasons most people listen to music in the first place. They, or their boosters, may write impenetrably turgid analyses of the structural underpinnings of their works and the strict mathematical relationships inherent therein, but to the extent that those relationships remain completely unapparent to the human ear - as they so often do - they're meaningless, and what we actually hear is . . . noise. Or we could just call it bad music. Why not? Moliere said, "Anyone can be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly." No one would dispute that there have been many honorable, sincere, dedicated, and very nice men and women writing music over the past 80 years. But if there are such things as "good pieces" or "great pieces," then there must also be such things as bad pieces. There simply happen to be pieces that work very poorly, if at all, pieces that to most ears don't make sense, and which therefore cannot do what honorable, sincere, and open-minded music lovers look for music to do. Do we agree that Bach and Handel were the greatest composers of the Baroque era? Then the other Baroque composers were . . . less great. And some were not very good at all. What's interesting is that we have little difficulty in agreeing on many of these distinctions when the people in question are long dead. Why not make distinctions while people are still alive, when making these distinctions might actually be useful? Despite what we've so often been told to think, why not go by what we hear? Why not say this: If a piece has had 30 or 50 - or 80 - years to be "understood" by the public but still isn't, the chances are extremely good that it never will be. And that's far more likely the fault of the piece and the composer, not the audiences. Why not come out and say, without apology for our supposed shortcomings, that the emperor has no clothes, and that too much of the music written over the past hundred years has been just plain bad? Am I being too harsh? Have I exaggerated the intensity of the distaste that so much modernist music has aroused? No, sad to say, not if we keep certain factors in mind. One is the strength of the needs, the intensity of the desires, that we fulfill with music. Our expectations of music - expectations of the type nurtured, reinforced, and satisfied for generation upon generation - are enormous, and enormously important to us, and when those expectations are disappointed, we take it very badly indeed. Another crucial factor is time. One of the more obvious reasons we appreciate music's giving meaning to time is that our supply of time is so limited. But this is also why we so strongly resent having our time filled with music that's ugly or unpleasant! From resentment to hatred is but a small step. Let me repeat: People have written very good and very moving pieces in styles that have little or nothing to do with tonality. Good composers find a way to write good music. Tonal music benefits from a built-in logic established by centuries of development, but any primarily atonal idiom requires the composer to create his or her own logic, and that can be very difficult. When it's done well, the logic makes itself understood, even on first hearing. The music flows in patterns that make sense, and the musical language, though perhaps unfamiliar, unusual, or highly spiced with dissonance, is comprehensible and convincing. Inevitably, however, we return to the fact that there's something basic to human nature in the perception of "pleasing sounds," and in the strength of the tonal structures that begin and end with those sounds. Blue has remained blue to us over the centuries, and yellow yellow, and salt has never started tasting like sugar. With or without physics, sounds that are pleasing to the ear continue to be pleasing, and we abandon them at great risk. History will say - history says now - that the 12-tone movement was ultimately a dead end, and that the long modernist movement that followed it was a failure. Deeply flawed at their musical and philosophical roots, unloving and oblivious to human limits and human needs, these movements left us with far too many works that are at best unloved, at worst detested. They led modern classical music to crisis, confusion, and, in many quarters, despair, to a sense that we've wasted decades. The good news is that there are many composers today who, despite the uncertain footing, are striving successfully, to write works that are worthy of our admiration and affection. They write in a variety of styles, but the ones who are most successful are those who are finding ways - often by assimilating ethnic idioms and national popular traditions - to invest their music with both rhythmic vitality and lyricism. They're finding ways to reconnect music to its eternal roots in dance and song. Still, I can't help wondering: Will anybody ever find new ways that are so striking, so wonderful, that our entire musical landscape will be transformed as if by magic? Well, magic itself may actually be our only hope for such a transformation. The mathematician Mark Kac, in attempting to describe the extraordinary genius of physicist Richard Feynman, came up with the following formulation: "There are two kinds of geniuses, the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians.' An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. . . . But it is different with the magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible."If we're very lucky, a musical magician may come along one day who will perform miracles in ways that are completely unforeseeable to us now. Others will learn from his or her work and contribute new riches. The term "modern music" will take on a wonderfully positive ring, and the heaven of better times will be thrown open to us. O gracious Art, let's hope we get lucky. Home / Words About Music |