What does it mean to be a composer in a post-tonal age?
And does it matter if it doesn't mean anything? N.B. This essay is part of a series of essays I started writing some months ago. In its present state it is more an attempted foray into Aesthetics.
Recently, I had a three hour long conversation with a friend about the nature of the compositional enterprise. The context of the conversation was about the question of tonality versus atonality or more properly speaking serialism. Interestingly, I had just had a conversation with my teacher about this topic a few weeks prior. I raised the question after watching an interview with Gyrogy Ligeti, in which he made the claim that if we attempted to go back to the old tonality we were in effect lying to ourselves. It must be said at the outset that to use the phrase, ‘post-tonal’ does not imply that the only option is serialism or atonality. Tonality as a concept used by composers in the Western art music tradition has a very specific meaning, namely, the use of the diatonic scale in an equal tempered tuning system, which enables one to smoothly make use of non-diatonic- chromatic- notes and chords as desired.
The question of tonality was not the only thing on the table though. There was also raised the question of music and its historical-aesthetic significance. This really needs to be broken down thoroughly, but suffice to say that under the influence of Enlightenment and German philosophy, music- as all the arts- are charged with progressing in such a manner as to give us a glimpse of the now bleeding into the future, all of which is presumably heading towards some utopic world- die Musik der Zukunft. This Austro-German traditional of musical aesthetics looms large in the the musical world. It’s an idea that we are exposed to early and one which we must come to terms with, either accepting it or rejecting it or finding a res media in which we are situate our own set of practices. Ligeti’s own statement implies that tonality as a practice belongs to a dead, irrecoverable past. He’s not entirely wrong, but neither is he correct.
Tonality, despite the best efforts of composers such as Boulez and Babbitt, continues to be a living and viable thing. But let’s be clear: tonality lives, but it is no longer the tonality of the 18th and 19th centuries. That understanding of tonality is moribund. It might be objected that if it is moribund, then why does that version of the tonal system form the heart of academic training in music schools around the world. My answer would be for the same reason that Greek and Latin formed the heart of academic training in the West from the Renaissance until very recently. The bulk of our concert and operatic repertoire is centered on music from that time period and that historical set of harmonic practices, so it makes sense inasmuch as for academic learning the literary classics formed the core of university studies, i.e., Greek and Latin. One might be surprised to learn that English departments did not appear in English speaking universities until the 1870s and 1880s. Shakespeare had to wait nearly three hundred years to be worthy of academic study. It’s not all that different in the musical world.
Whenever I talk with people, and I hear such phrases as, “That was so atonal. I didn’t like it at all,” what I am actually hearing is this: “I didn’t like this or that because it is so dissonant.” People seem to equate consonance with tonality and dissonance with atonality or serialism, but this is a false dichotomy. For its time, a lot of the music of Brahms and Wagner, not to mention Beethoven and and even Mozart, were quite dissonant. Or rather, they were constantly exploring and pushing the boundaries of audible dissonance within what was a relatively closed system. That closed system collapsed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, yet we hear music prior to that as somehow more ‘consonant’ than what comes after. Why?
There are two reasons. Just as the closed system of diatonicism based on triadic harmonies was dissolving, technologies of recordings were becoming readily available to the general public. The initial emphasis, then as now, was what was immediately popular and recent. Recordings democratized the classical music world, enabling anyone with a phonograph to listen to Mozart or Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, Brahms and Bizet. This mass distribution of the major works of the previous century hammered those sounds into people’s imaginary ears. In a sense, works of the recent past became enculturated into people’s minds. As Adam Neeley likes to say, repetition legitimizes. Recordings geometrically amplified the capacity to repeat listen to music. We’ve heard so many musical tropes so many times that we have taken something that ‘is’ for what ‘ought to be.’
The second reason follows from the first. People are odd beings. We- or most of us- instinctively prefer the familiar. It’s as if we’re programmed that way or perhaps it is part of our animal nature. Animals- pets- do not like it when there is a break from the routine. They can get extremely stressed out. Humans are not so different. Yet, the ability to both enjoy and create the novel and the new is precisely what makes us human. Without that we are just another species of animal on this planet trying to survive and reproduce.
The diatonic systems of the latter 17th through early 20th centuries- let’s say 1725 to 1910- are just one phase in human musical history, but its imprint cannot be overstated. A large reason for this is due to the technologies that were created at the precise point of their dissolution, technologies which unwittily constructed for us and our ears a musical imaginary of what real music must sound like. This is one of several reasons we’ve been unable to completely step out of the 19th century, and why it haunts our imaginations. Coupled with outdated notions of historical teleology, the classical music world has become something of an aesthetic ideology we struggle to content with.
But wait, there’s more.
The question over whether the way in which we hear music as innately consonant or dissonant produces either pleasure or displeasure is far from decided. However, the bulk of the evidence would suggest that concepts such as consonance and dissonance are cultural rather than biologically innate. This has serious implications for the future of music. But let’s consider for a moment one other aspect that gets lost in all these aesthetic discussions, namely, Tradition.
For anyone who’s ever studied music in higher education, there is a running theme throughout our coursework. That theme is that music has a history, and that history is intimately linked with the cultural history of the West. Notated music in the West starts properly in the 10th century, and from there develops counterpoint, then harmony, culminating in music’s apotheosis as a legitimate art form on its own terms in the 18th century and hence to today. This construct excludes non-Western music, and treats the history of notated music as if it were only a Western affair. The other aspect of this training is that the history of Western music is progressive. The developments in music history represent net positive changes and improvements over the past. To take but one example, my own instrument, the oboe. There is no question that beginning with the Triebert systeme 6, the oboe reached a pinnacle of development and the modern oboe is a superior instrument to say, the Baroque oboe. The same argument could be made for the valued trumpet and French horn, but the is a problem in this judgement.
The problem is that what we have here is a value judgement. That’s why this represents an aesthetic issue, yet what the history of Western music is really evaluating in these kinds of judgements is not aesthetics qua aesthetics, but rather technique. There is little question that the technological advances in a variety of areas from acoustics to music theory or instrument design have gone through enormous transformations in the West in the last five hundred years or so. But do those technical innovations, by themselves, entail some kind of inherent cultural progress aesthetically?
This is not the place to try to answer that question. I only wish to point it out because it seems to me that we in the West often seem to privilege technical innovation as a mark of cultural superiority. I would also like to add that I’m in no way advocating going back to the Baroque oboe or natural trumpet either. In fact, I’m not arguing that either is inherently superior, but rather that each is product of certain technical problems raised in response to aesthetic problems raised by creative composers. In other words, acts of creativity that go beyond the known is but one component that drives the history of art through time. Art both solves and creates problems that must then be addressed.
Thus, Ligeti was not wrong. The tonal system of that arose in the time of Bach and was extended into the Classical period and laid the foundation for everything that followed until around 1900 had to die. Further, once dead, its resurrection as a coherent system of musical grammar and syntax is foreclosed. Yes, composers brought back modalism in the 20th century after a four hundred year hiatus, but it was no longer the modalism of des Prez, de Lasso, or Palestrina. Nor could it be. Even if composers could return to what’s called tonality, it would have be something other than a mere pastiche of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Trying to return to such a past compositionally would be the equivalent of trying play Stravinsky on a Baroque oboe or natural trumpet.
In short, Tonality is dead; long live tonality. I use the lower and upper cases intentionally. Tonality is certainly not dead, but it’s no longer the major-minor paradigm that we associate with ‘classical’ music. And that’s a good thing. Composers can forge their own melodic and harmonic languages as an expression of an individual. Those open enough to be receptive to their voices can enjoy this vast sea of sound in a way unprecedented in human history. We should be grateful to have made it so far as to live in such times, challenging as they are. That they are challenging is what makes art the worthwhile.