Composer, Pianist

This is another dichotomy that is in evidence in the XXI century.  While music during the Romantic era tried to appeal to our emotions and to make us feel our humanity, music became more interested in appealing to the intellect in the XX century. Schoenberg and his music based on numerical sequences was trying to develop a system that would make people listen to his sequences of pitches in a different way than they were used to, guided by a concept of series of numbers, trying to follow that sequence of numbers throughout a piece, regardless of  past usage of thos pitches or of conventions. This, I think, was an attempt of breaking our emotional bonds with the musical structures of the past through the use of our intellect. I think Schoenberg might have been trying to develop different conventions and have certain series of notes mean something emotionally different that they had meant up to that point. However,  I think that the effort, in general, failed. That type of music has not changed popular music to any marked degree. Maybe it has expanded the chords that one can use. Maybe it has allowed us to envision a different music but we are still in a tonal universe, where major and minor scales are used all the time. Which leads me to another dichotomy:

This is an important dichotomy in order  to understand music of the XX century and classical music in general.  Many times there is a great simplicity associated with beauty. Some of Beethoven’s most beloved works are simple works, like the piano piece “Fur Elise”  or the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Bach wrote works of great complexity but the “Air for the G String” has been heard many times in all kinds of settings and arrangements. However,  complexity can make a piece more interesting if the listener agrees to commit to unravel the complexity of the piece and to make an effort to understand it..

I find that there is an optimum level of the ratio of simplicity to complexity for each individual. Too much simplicity makes the work boring. Too much complexity makes the work frustrating as the listener feels left out of the game. This is a very basic dichotomy and I think that much of  XX century music tended toward the complex and that is the reason that minimalism was able to thrive. People were so tired of complexity that when Phillip Glass appeared on the scene, the door was wide open for a more repetitive, simplistic approach to music making.

So these dichotomies are like swinging pendulums. Sometimes you get complex music, sometimes simple. This phenomenon happened also at the end of the Baroque era and the beginning of the Classical period. The complexity of Johann Sebastian Bach was such that the arrival of Mozart and Haydn, with their “galant style” which consisted mainly of a melody with an accompaniment  was very welcome.

But there is another factor involved here, another dichotomy:

I am going to continue my meditations on music and on a framework to understand it better. I was going to abandon them but I will finish them before embarking on something else.

I have put a lot of thought a lot about what the opposite of melody is, or what I could contrast with it and I think randomness is the best choice. Melody is a unifying factor in music. It puts order in a series of sounds heard consecutively. It helps us remember the music.

Melodies are structured in different ways in different musical systems. If you heard an Arabic melody it would be different from a Chinese melody as well as  from an Occidental melody. But the concatenation of different pitches is a fundamental part of all the music we hear. When we cannot link the sounds, and we cannot put some linear order into the music, we tend to reject it. In fact, when playing classical music of the XVIII and XIX century, the performers have to use a considerable amount of judgement in their performance so as to bring out  to melodic lines, allowing the public to follow the logic of the piece. Some atonal melodies are linked by a concept or by an arbitrary numeric succession, as in serialism. This will either result in a person being able to link the sounds, in which case he may like the work, or will result in a confusion, which many times will also lead to the rejection of the work.

There is another key word which we should bring into the conversation here,  and that is “motive”. A motive is a short sequence of notes that repeats throughout a composition. A good example of a motive are the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. This motive is repeated many times in the first minute of the work in order to form a melody but the whole basis of the piece is a motive. Still, if the motives are not used to form longer thoughts, we might get melodically lost in the piece and start to perceive it as a bunch of random sounds. Which leads us to the next dichotomy:

So why would a composer abandon beauty in a musical composition? Here we get to the second dichotomy in music: Interesting-Boring. If a composer used a very beautiful chord and repeated it 20 times, even if it was the most beautiful chord in the world, your mind would probably start wandering or you would change the track in your device. Music has to be interesting. The composer has to engage his listener. This might actually be the most important dichotomy. Throughout the history of music, changes were introduced in the most part to make it interesting. That is the origin of the language of XX century music. It got really dissonant and the structures were changed radically because the sounds that had been used in the XVIII and XIX century had been used so much that even though they were very beautiful, they were boring to the composers. They were also boring to parts of the public particularly to the true connoisseurs, and to some of the critics. That explains the rise of atonal music and the backing it received in some critical circles.

Now, in popular music the lyrics of a song contribute greatly to the interest of the song but in classical instrumental music, we have to create interest in different ways. And so we get to the third dichotomy:

The first dichotomy we will use when talking about music is ugliness-beauty. This is a very important dichotomy in all the arts, as the achievement of beauty has long been a goal of artists. However, as Plato said: “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”. I have found, nevertheless, that there is a general agreement in our society as to what constitutes beauty and what doesn’t, in music. We actually have words that describe sounds that go well together, or are generally agreeable to our ears (consonances) and sounds that clash when played at the same time (dissonances). The fact that there is some sort of agreement as to what is consonant and what is dissonant means that there is some sort of agreement on beauty. That is the first part of beauty I am going to use in my evaluations, “consonant-dissonant”. Now, the agreement as to what is consonant and dissonant has varied through time. I won’t get into technical details about that. Suffice to say that when I am talking about music I am doing so with the ears of a classical musician that is living at the beginning of the XXI century.

The second part of beauty-ugliness I will use is the quality of each sound itself. After much consideration I think the proper dichotomy to use would be: “Harsh-Mellow”. A harsh sound would be a violin used in its highest range, while a mellow sound would be a violin being played in its usual range. Harsh could also be a violin being hit with the bow in a lower range but giving us a disagreeable sound. This is judging each sound by itself, not in relationship to other sounds. We find harsher sounds being used in the 20th and 21st Centuries and mellower sounds in the 18th and 19th centuries. So we will use consonance-dissonance and harsh-mellow because I consider them more objective than beautiful-ugly.

Music is a complex subject. How can we understand it fully without studying it professionally? I’m talking about classical music, of course, or as they call it in Latin-American countries, “serious music”. Of course, the more you know, the easier it will be for you to relate to this type of music, particularly to the contemporary brand of it; however, I think that we can communicate better about it and thus achieve a better understanding if we relate to music though the use of dichotomies. I mentioned this in my last blog post, almost a year ago, but I didn’t get to develop the concept. I intend to do so now. Paragraph by paragraph I will endeavor to post regularly until the basic terms and parameters are defined and then I intend to talk about the music of our times.