The Musician in the Music Part 1

The Traditional Artist

Music is most universally popular of all arts and yet one of the most difficult to master. In music too, the ideas that have been discussed in ‘The Artist in the Art’ series have led to a general degradation. Before we go into the trends that took western music to its present situation let us discuss just one brief situation with Indian music.

Music is an art form in India in which the entire tradition continues even today, though in a much reduced capacity. But it is still vibrant to produce great artists like M. S. Subbulakshmi.

She is one of the most famous artists of her time. But she is not famous for creating her own songs, her own stotras, or her own symphonies. Rather she is famous for rendering in her magical voice, some of the greatest of stotras, sahasranams, and suprabhatams that were created by the great rishis of ancient India.

As an artist, she was much respected and her fame was international. And yet she was not famous for ‘patenting’ some technique of her own, or for creating a music album which ‘discovered something new under the sky’. She excelled in rendering the great creations of her ancestors.

The same is true about other artists too. Pandit Jasraj lends his magical voice to the traditional Ragas, but does not violate them. He creates new bhajans and new songs, but not new ragas. Kishori Amonikar is most famous for rendering the symphonies of Meerabai in her magical voice.

In the north there are individual imprints on musical creations but these imprints too are known by the name of the tradition of the particular gharana of music, rather than certain individuals. Even in these innovations the basic rules of music laid down in the Natyashastra and other great musical texts of the middle ages are not violated. The traditional idea of music is confirmed in all the ‘new creations’.

This does not mean that the artist did not have creative freedom and he could only create music in the strict confines of canonical rules. Dr. Bharat Gupt, one of the foremost authorities on music, drama, and fine arts in contemporary India says that the shastras in India provide a formula or a template to create art. It is upon the artist to innovate and create particular pieces of art based on these formulas or templates.

These templates are based upon the fundamental rules of aesthetics as given by Bharat Muni in the Natyashastra. Thus contrary to some modern opinions, classical art does not restrict an artist from innovation or creativity but provides a template based on some universal rules of aesthetics but leaving ample room for innovation.

That being said the artistic ethos of India fostered a climate where striving up to the standards of the ancients was considered an ideal. There was much artistic creativity on individual level, but the artist himself was encouraged to meditate and lose himself in the Supreme Consciousness and it was believed that real music and real innovation came from the inspiration of the Divine, from the touch of the Supreme Consciousness in various states of meditation. Individual innovation devoid of divine inspiration was considered incapable of touching the heights necessary to create great music.

Dissonance and the Inversion of Classical Ideas

India was not alone in believing that individual innovation has to be blessed with divine inspiration to create great art. This was the case with all ancient traditions all over the world: in the East in China or Japan, or in the West in Greece and Rome.

In the case of music, it was sometime during the Enlightenment that this idea was abandoned and personal innovation started overpowering divine inspiration.

Though the break with the traditional idea of creating music had been done in the Enlightenment it was in the early 20th century that radical developments were made which ‘rebelled’ against the traditional idea of music.

Igor Stravinsky is considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, credited with many new inventions and remaining at the forefront of the avant garde movements in music that had become common in the early 20th century. (Tommasini)

In music, like in everything else, ideology had come to pervade by the early 20th century. In the beginning of the 20th century, Stravinsky, like many of his colleagues, was experimenting with new techniques and new inspirations for creating an entirely different kind of music.

The days of the Narodnik Movement were not completely a matter of the past. The movement had exhorted the students of cities to go to the villages of Mother Russia to discover new themes and get inspired by the folk culture.

In music, this theme persisted longer than other areas. Stravinsky studied folk music for some time and around 1913 he came up with one of the most revolutionary pieces in western music – The Rite of Spring. It was a ballet and orchestral concert work which was claimed to be based upon folk music.

In this ballet, he experimented with various technicalities of musical wizardry, including tonality, metre, and stress, but the most revolutionary and shocking of all was his use of dissonance.

Dissonance, as the word suggests, is a lack of harmony among musical notes. It is something which the composers, at least before Stravinsky, usually shied away from. Music had to have consonance which means harmony among musical notes, so the different instruments flow together to create a melodious harmony.

Stravinsky stood this idea on its head. What Bertolt Brecht did in drama, he did in music. He refused to go by the core practices of his discipline. Like Wassily Kandinsky in painting, he did not just want to experiment in art, but also with the crafts of music. He wanted the musician to be ‘completely free’, even of all musical discipline.

Consonance was considered the basic discipline in music. If your music wasn’t consonant, then it wasn’t considered imperfect and faulty. Stravinsky violated that basic rule and gave the idea of ‘dissonance in music’.

The result was, as expected, horrible. The audience first described the resulting ballet as nothing more than a ‘screeching riot’. And it was a natural reaction. However, like all things ideologically fashionable, the public abhorrence of the Rite of Spring was considered as a proof of artistic greatness by all the avant garde musicians and artists of the age, particularly in France and gradually the idea of ‘dissonance’ picked up.

It was the intellectual climate of Europe at the time, in which different disciplines of arts, literature, music, painting, and architecture were in the process of self-destruction. They were experimenting with the very crafts of the discipline, in a bid to search something new.

And after a while, this search led them to deconstruct what had been created by the ancestors. Stravinsky’s dissonance was a result of this urge. Music caught on to this urge later on, but with Stravinsky, this urge for degradation just exploded.

Stravinsky was followed by Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel. Bartok’s singular contribution was to break down the diatonic system of harmony in music. For three hundred years, musical composers before Bartok had used the diatonic system which according to a broad agreement created harmony in music. But since the goal in music was now to deconstruct harmony, Bartok disavowed the use of diatonic harmony in his music.

Maurice Ravel created various great and truly beautiful pieces but flowing with the fashion of his age he played with various traditional concepts. In most musical pieces in the preceding three hundred years, the convention was to develop a piece until it reaches a climax. Ravel instead created pieces which replaced development with repetition.

At the start of the 20th century a group of avant garde artists was created called Les Apaches or ‘The Hooligans’. By self-expression its members were ‘artistic outcasts’. One of its star members was Claude Debussy. He was a musical genius who loved to play with traditional ideas. In Ravel’s own words Debussy’s “genius was obviously one of great individuality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution, expressing itself freely…” (Orenstein 33)

The point to note here is that he was appreciated more for his ‘creation of his own laws’ than good pieces of music. ‘Innovation’, no matter how strange or unpleasant to the ear it was, had started to be prized more than the actual quality of music.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. Published by IndicaToday.