Akshayjha at 18:59, 19 July 2024

2024-07-19T18:59:03Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 00:29, 20 July 2024
Line 82:		Line 82:

	Authored by Pankaj Saxena.		Authored by Pankaj Saxena.
	Published by IndicaToday.		Published by IndicaToday.[[Category:Art and Culture]]

Akshayjha: Created page with "==== Ideology and Politics Overcome Musical Tradition ==== The trend to violate the most classical rules of music had started. Composers started creating music based on dissonance, ambiguity and atonality. All of these new ‘techniques’ were actually considered faults in classical music. But modern composers turned them into bedrocks of their musical ‘innovations’. The results were more often than not were unpleasant and not pleasing to the ear but ‘judging mus..."

2024-07-19T18:58:59Z

Created page with "==== Ideology and Politics Overcome Musical Tradition ==== The trend to violate the most classical rules of music had started. Composers started creating music based on dissonance, ambiguity and atonality. All of these new ‘techniques’ were actually considered faults in classical music. But modern composers turned them into bedrocks of their musical ‘innovations’. The results were more often than not were unpleasant and not pleasing to the ear but ‘judging mus..."

New page

==== Ideology and Politics Overcome Musical Tradition ====
The trend to violate the most classical rules of music had started. Composers started creating music based on dissonance, ambiguity and atonality.

All of these new ‘techniques’ were actually considered faults in classical music. But modern composers turned them into bedrocks of their musical ‘innovations’. The results were more often than not were unpleasant and not pleasing to the ear but ‘judging music’ based on classical ideas was already a backward thing to do in the 1950s and 60s musical scene.

Just like a modern painting could not be ‘judged’ for the ‘beauty is created in the act of seeing’ and judgment was considered plebeian or downright evil, so in music, what was prized was the strangeness of a musical piece and not its ability to please the audience. Ideology had triumphed aesthetics in music too.

Once again, there is nothing wrong in innovation but in all classical theories of art there is a boundary which is never to be crossed in search for ‘innovation’. There are some universals which are never violated. Artistic freedom is never absolute and there are some universal laws and rules are always to be followed.

Drawing this boundary is necessary because once the theoretical need for creating such a boundary is lifted, the floodgates of directionless, meaningless and aimless ‘innovation’ open and soon art degenerates into something which is indistinguishable from nonsense.

When these ideas of aimless, unguided and non-directional ‘innovation’ were introduced in music they resulted in pieces which were hardly distinguishable from noise. A classical definition of pitch, one of the fundamental units of denoting music is that it should have a frequency that is clear and stable enough to distinguish it from noise.

I need not pitch in here to say that this rule was also regularly violated in ‘modern music’. Is it any wonder that what resulted was scarcely better than ‘noise’?

In music this erasure of boundaries meant that melodious and harmonious music was the farthest thing to be expected from the avant garde artists.

Musician Nikhil Rao tells us that this trend in ‘musical innovation’ degenerated to a point where composers were recording things like running bicycles, slamming doors, and other assorted screeching noises.

Barring a few exceptions who still produce good music on classical lines, classical music died a death in the 1950s and 60s with these avant garde ‘innovations’. In the words of Alex Ross:

“Within the classical composition, meanwhile, activity on the outer edges had further blurred the job description. By the early fifties, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were creating collages that incorporated recordings of train engines and other urban sounds; Karlheinz Stockhausen was assisting in the invention of synthesized sound; John Cage was convening ensembles of radios. By century’s end, a composer could be a performance artist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptualist, or an avant-garde d.j…” (Ross, The New Yorker)

Much of this ‘musical innovation’ resulted after the Second World War ended. The two world wars massively disturbed music in traditional Europe and even though modern music had made great headway in pre-war Europe, in post-war America, a melting pot of musicians and artists was created in which traditional imprints disappeared and innovation became more and more important.

The primary purpose of modern and postmodern music was to shock the audience and not to entertain and elevate them with classical musical principles of melody and harmony. Arnold Schoenberg, a genius, was a master of creating atonal music in which traditional boundaries were regularly broken.

Like Brecht’s dictum that the fourth wall in theatre had to be regularly broken down, many of Schoenberg’s compositions required him to come out of singing and music, and engage in plain talking for a while before going back to singing.

A favorite trope of these avant garde artists was to use classical musical instruments in unconventional ways. Breaking convention, the greatest cliché of modern life was practiced to the hilt by these modern composers. John Cage, a very influential modern American composer, would often insert erasers, screws, and nails between the strings of the piano to distort the sounds and create new if bizarre and even jarring effects.

The aim is to discomfort the audience and ‘shock them out of musical conventions’. The means, more often than not, is to deliberately create horrifying and harsh music, which can seldom be differentiated from noise. Commenting upon the neo-modernist music of Brian Ferneyhough musical historian Rutherford-Johnson says:

“The way Ferneyhough deliberately overpacks his music with information, starting and restarting it every few seconds to create a perceptual overload, thwarts the memory’s ability to create a meaningful structure… Time after time, what we have just heard is pushed into the background by what follows next.” (Rutherford-John 177)

The reader would recall the article “The Author in Literature”, where James Joyce lead the movement of ‘Stream of Consciousness’, a writing style where the author ‘does not edit’ anything that comes to his mind and keeps writing continuously without ever paying attention to meaning, chronology, plot, and even grammar, syntax or spelling. Many pages in the ‘masterpiece’ of Stream of Consciousness writing novel Finnegan’s’ Wake are filled with gibberish like ‘ratttttttttttt…shhhhhhhhhhhh…hottttttttttttttoooooooooooooooooooo…’

Similarly, in music, the idea of Chance Music was floated. In this ‘technique’ no attention was paid to any deliberate composition. All the rules of compositions were of course thrown out the window. All aspects of music including composition and performance were left to chance. The most famous piece of ‘chance music’ is the composition ‘4’33’.

Calling it composition would be a contradiction in terms for it does not involve any music at all. In its ‘performance’ the audience sat staring at a non-playing stage and the ‘sound of the hall’ or in plain words, the noise of the audience was considered a ‘multi-movement’ composition!

Then there was Electronic Music in which composers like Edgard Varese actually synthesized new sounds using electronic instruments. Great genius and mathematician Charles Babbitt created computer-based musical pieces with such precise details that it can only be played by a computer and never by a human being. Computer Music claimed to ‘liberate music’ from human follies. Believe it or not but Noise Music is also a genre in the postmodernist musical scene.

It is not a wonder that this resulted in the death of classical music. Popular music on the other hand got a great fillip during the mid-20th century. Various musical movements and trends like rock, jazz, rap, and blues replaced classical music. But these movements did not escape the destructive tendency of postmodern music either. No rules and no holds barred ‘compositions’ became the norm. It was increasingly rare to find one musician creating good music consistently.

There was no emphasis on the learning of crafts or developing skills. Music was increasingly considered an ‘attitude’ rather than a craft or an art. All one had to do was adopt clothes, habits, and attitudes of the lifestyle of musicians, whatever it was. Knowing music and learning to play instruments was considered a secondary requirement if it was considered important at all.

Ideology became the prime requirement in music too. ‘Rebelling against tradition’ became the pre-eminent requirement of movements like punk rock. Just like Dadaism, the goal here was to keep destroying the tradition whatever it was. There was no central idea, no essence in these ‘musical movements’ if we can call them that. The only idea in these ‘musical movements’ was to keep destroying the traditional idea of music.

The modern music creates some really good pieces every now and then. But it is mostly due to accident. Bad musicians sometimes hit upon good numbers. Even good musicians with artistic ability suffer, because increasingly music schools and universities discourage the learning of skill and crafts and instead pay attention towards making ideological and political statements through music.

Prophetic Monotheism and the Disappearance of the Sacred Idea of Music

One of the greatest victories of Prophetic Monotheism is that gradually over two millennia it managed to overwhelm every aspect of human culture with ideological fashions. Music did not survive this onslaught either. The effect of Prophetic Monotheism on music was subtle and indirect, but it was there. In order to understand that first we need to understand how music remained intact in India.

India too witnesses all the modern movements in music like jazz, pop, rap, rock, etc. But in classical music, traditions which are millennia old still continue. Most of the classical music in India still follows most of the universal guidelines that were given in first the Natyashastra and then various other musical masterpieces like Sangeet Ratnakara.

What kept Indian Classical Music composed and together as a tradition was its continued focus on the spiritual goal in all musical compositions. No matter the direction from which Indian classical music is approached the divine never disappears completely from it.

This is truer about Carnatic music which became the refuge of Indian classical music and this tradition continued almost untouched till modern times.

Hindustani music in the north received some inputs during the Mughal era, but the influence was mainly in the modification of some musical instruments and not so much in the approach of music which is mostly full of bhakti and jnana.

It is the spiritual core which was eliminated in Western classical music once Christianity triumphed over Europe. At first, music remained melodious and harmonious if not meaningful in the sense of uplifting and leading towards the ultimate truth, but by the time of the Enlightenment degeneration was setting in and in the post-war West it altogether degenerated into noise.

The original reason behind the disappearance of the spiritual core was the imposition of Christianity over Europe and the destruction of the pagan culture. Once the divine disappeared from music, the pagan trends continued in the service of the church for some millennia but gradually and continuously lost their purpose.

In the Orthodox Church in the east, singing and chanting was retained and as a result they still retain an imprint of their own and despite the Christian theology this branch of church music still retains some spiritual core.

In the west, music was successively de-spiritualized. By the time of the Protestantism music was almost completely banished in favor of prayers. As a result, there was an explosion of beautiful and creative music in the secular domain which originally produced great masters whose symphonies are still as fresh as ever.

But with this secularization of music and the disappearance of the divine from the music resulted in a trend which we are now all familiar with. The introduction of the individual musician and the removal of the divine in the music led to a search for the ever new and the ever strange and the ‘classical music’ went down a path which ended in recording screeching noises of doors, of running bicycles, and creating ‘multi-movement’ music where audience’s chatter was considered live music.

==== References ====
Orenstein, Arbie. Ravel: Man and Musician. Mineola. US Dover, 1991.

Ross, Alex. “The Sounds of the Music in the Twenty-First Century”. The New Yorker. August 27, 2018 Issue.

Rutherford-John, Tim. Music after the Fall – Modern Composition and Culture since 1989. University of California Press, 2017. p. 177.

Tommasini, Anthony. “The Art of Setting the Sense on Edge”. The New Yorker. May 30, 2014.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena.
Published by IndicaToday.

The Musician in the Music Part 2 - Revision history

Akshayjha at 18:59, 19 July 2024