The Problem With the "New Tonality"
John GibbonsAtonality? The verdict is in. There is not a large enough public for works written in atonal idioms to make the case that there is anything but an esoteric future for atonality (with the partial exception of theatrical works; opera and cinema for instance, where it fares rather better than in works without dramatic distractions). There are enough performers who like this repertory to keep the great atonal masters alive, however, especially on CD. But genuine public enthusiasm for new works in an atonal idiom? Not even in Germany. And another problem: it is perfectly possible to hide technical deficiences in atonal music, unlike with tonal music, where clumsy voice leading, short breathed melodic material, incompetence with cadences, etc. is ruthlessly exposed.
And exposed it is. Neo-Tonality won’t really work in the long run. New tonal works from Glass to Pendereckei to that whiz kid who’s written a million symphonies by the age of 2 at Eastman prove this. And it is not really the fault of composers, many of whom sincerely want to connect with a reasonable sized audience. Furthermore, I find it difficult to respect composers who don’t patently want an audience, even if a narrowly constricted one. And academic colleagues hardly count. I believe it was Jakob Druckman, who opined at a composition seminar at Peabody Conservatory in the ’80s (when I studied there) That there wasn’t a composer alive today as competent as Paul Dukas. If it wasn’t Druckman, it was still somebody prominent. So what’s the problem?
1. The minimalists understood profoundly that new tonal music had to be mostly non-chromatic. Allowing chromaticism in just starts the ball rolling all over again, and we’ve been there, done that. History happened. Chopin, Wagner, Strauss, Schoenberg, Boulez and Babbitt happened. But the minimalists found that their limited harmonic means were, well, limited. But there was good reason to rebel against oversaturated chromaticism, of which atonality was the final expression.
2. Composers are no longer trained in the necessarily rigorous way of the old days. Kids at conservatories don’t know the difference between an augmented 6th chord and an incomplete dominant 9th. They don’t know when to use the first inversion, etc. They just don’t…and I know, I’ve heard a lot of this stuff. And I promise you, you have to know this stuff! It’s not some outdated overly technical stuff that some pompous Poindexter clings to because he’s a pedant, it is the very stuff of which any tonal (that is, traditional Western tonality with the octave divided into 12 parts) music consists. Contemporary tonalists often choose chords willy-nilly according to their limited conception of what “sounds good”. A lot of this stuff ends up sounding like Prokofiev, who may have been a master, but who was not a master of tonal harmony. It sounds attractive, but in the last analysis sounds arbitrary as well.
3. Traditional tonality is limited. It is incredibly resourceful, but not limitlessly so. And it is no more acoustically natural or mandated by nature than atonality, for example. It’s a brilliant system created by the mind of man, not the mandate of nature. This is provable at the piano, for instance. By retuning a piano you get different reverberations, different resonant sympathies, which would result in different but viable tonal systems. How about the overtone series, then? Isn’t it true that the most audible overtones of a given pitch outline the tonal triad? Yes, indeed. But other overtones are there as well. I liken the phenomena to written or verbal expression, with varying degrees of complex expression. Beethoven’s 5th uses the simple words, let’s say the Hemingway words, but Strauss’s Elektra uses more recondite language, like Joyce words, for instance.
What is the solution, then? I’m not sure. By the way, I anticipate that the legions of admirerers for the new tonality will vehemently disagree with this article. I appreciate that, and am certainly open to modifying my viewpoint, and will continue to attentively listen to much new music, both tonal and non-tonal.
Reader Comments (17)
Very good topic John,
That Wiz kid from Eastman needs to stop. I don't hear the melodic genius of Mozart in any of his music so I find it strange that he has become popular at such a young age. I heard a piece of his on WFMT performed by the Milwaukee Symphony recently where he messed around with themes of Beethoven and I found it to be such an obsurd piece of music that I was actually offended by the end of it.
I doubt anyone in this day and age can do something with Beethovens themes and fragments that has not already been done by the man himself.
This brings me to complete agreement with your blog. Young composers today that compose in the tonal relm just don't have anything useful to say in my opinion or they don't know how to say it. Johnn Williams is great but he is mostly ripping of previous composers like Ravel etc. Maybe this is part of the problem? So much has been done that almost anything composed tonaly sounds like something else.
Atoanl music to me has always been much to academic in it's effect. As a performer, I have little intrest in finding and conveying the meaning of the 11th pitch of a 12 tone row and I doubt an audience member is saying to himself boy that C# is so pleasing because it has equal value and relation to the d, f, g, etc before it.
Can tonal music still be composed as a viable means of expression? Hopefully. I think composers today need to spend a lot more time learning the language and less time making a mockery of it.
A splendid post, Ryan. I couldn't agree more.
Ryan, do you mean "atonal" music, which is music written outside the traditional tonal hierarchy, or do you mean "serial/12-tone" music, written according to Schoenberg's 12-tone principles, with a tone row, etc? They're not the same thing, to state the obvious. Do you think composers deliberately set out to mock particular styles?
John - you've ruled atonal music AND new tonal music out of court. What's left? And could you provide some examples of the composers you're thinking of? (I'm actually curious what you mean by "minimalism," as well, given discussions about the term in the musical blogosphere in the last week or so.
Thank you for your query, Ms. Hirsh. Twelve-tone music, aka "Dodecaphony", is an attempt to systematize and rationalize atonality for use in large structures. If one says, all zebras are animals, but not all animals are zebras, for instance, you could say zebras are dodecaphony and animals are atonality.
I'm not ruling anything out! I think atonality is legitimate and appropriate to our time, but the fact that audiences hate it so much points to a limited future. As for tonality, I can't think of a single composer today who understands the inner function of tonality as well as the most mediocre, but well trained romantic composer.
The minimalists found a solution, but it doesn't work for me, it's too simple for my taste. By minimalism and postminimalism, we're referring to, in the first place, composers such as Reilly, Glass and Reich, and in the second place to composers like Adams, perhaps Tavener and Part. I'm sure a cursory survey of the internet will fill you in on the minimalist scene, with audio and visual clips, etc.
It is not unprecedented for serious music to have peaks and valleys. When one is in a valley, it's easy to lose perspective. If I don't like anything, then that's my problem.
That's Hirsch, and just call me Lisa.
I guess you must have missed the discussion on multiple blogs (Kyle Gann, Steve Smith, and others) about minimalism, which ranged rather far beyond Adams, Glass, etc. and took off from last week's Times survey of minimalist recordings.
Your response sounds as if it's to someone who is not familiar with the technical meaning of the terms "atonal" and "serial," though I thought my question to Ryan made it clear that I'm very familiar with them. I'm a working part-time classical critic for San Francisco Classical Voice (http://www.sfcv.org/) and active chorister with a music degree and a couple of years of graduate study in musicology. (My day job is technical writing.) I blog about classical music at http://irontongue.blogspot.com/.
Right you are, Lisa. I apologize for mistyping your name in the first place, especially since it was right in front of me, and in the second place I definitely recognise your comment to Ryan shows that you indeed know the difference between so-called free atonality and dodecaphony. Many people don't, so I took the opportunity of clarifying the difference, I should have made that clear.
I guess I made a wrong assumption about the recent minimalist blogging; there is quite a bit out there even prior to the last few weeks, And I had thought you were referring to a more general discussion. I'll definitely check out the blogs you mention. I should have read your comment more attentively! You also might have made your considerable musical experience and background more apparent. I get quite a few innocent questions about basic stylistic distinctions in person and on my personal e-mail. Holdekunst is still just three weeks old. Please accept my apologies. If you'd like to contribute a more in depth discussion of these matters, I'd be delighted to let you use this space. A colleague of mine, who appears in these pages named David, is an absolute expert on minimalism and postminimalism; since these styles aren't my thing, I anticipate and hope that he will provide commentaries on this important topic. To some extent, I'm stuck in the past when it comes to minimalism, I haven't kept up to date in anything but a haphazard manner. Running this blog will be a learning experience for me, as well!
I have just spent about a full hour finding and reading Kyle Gann's and Steve Smith's blogs plus the many replies and counter-replies all related to last Friday's New York Times critics' survey of "minimalism". Each of six critics picked exactly four CD's (or sets) which represented their "favorite" recordings of (?) - there is still no truly accepted definition of "Minimalism".Thanks to Lisa for mentioning above that this article had caused a lot of blog activity - I was unaware of so many comments because I found most of the choices utterly predictable and conventional. I guess that sort of puts me in the Kyle Gann camp, as he listed many other pieces more deserving than most of those picked.
I found Anne Midgette's choices the best : she called Riley's "In C" "the defining work of minimalism", which supports my espousing it as the most important work of the 20th century, and she also picked "Einstein on the Beach", which I mentioned yesterday as the most perfect operatic performance I've attended. She also picked John Adams' Harmonium, although I would have rather someone mentioned Adams' Harmonielehre (no one did). Perhaps I can ask Lisa, who lives in the Bay area, if anyone there has a CD copy of the Tilson-Thomas/SFO Harmonielehre that used to be available to listen to on the American Mavericks website? I used to listen to it frequently as it's vastly superior to either commercial CD, but I can't find it anymore on the Internet.
John, in relation to the title of this post, I don't know what the "new tonality" is. You seem to mean recent tonal works by composers with insufficient traditional training. If so, you have constructed an irrefutable argument - why should anyone want to waste time on incompetence just because it's tonal - we have Baroque concerti for that. I also agree that atonality is dead. So the only thing to disagree on (possibly) is your belief that minimalism is too simple for you, and all I can do there is to suggest you listen to all 12 parts of Glass' Music in 12 Parts (probably the summit of true minimalism) at a very high volume level and see if you bliss out, or at least hear something not so simple. Part 12 builds a Schoenbergian tone row before your very ears- very sarcastically!
Thank you for examining these sites and forming informed viewpoints about them, David.
I've found that it's impossible for any one musician to know, or to be equally conversant with, or sympathetic to so many diverse styles!
As an authorial contributor to this site, I invite you to post about these topics; articles, or reviews...it's a vital subject, and not one to which I'm currently able to give sufficiently informed commentary...I will indeed listen to the Glass piece!
I'll be happy to lend you either version - yes there are two complete versions. The earlier one (on Virgin) is very hard to find, but some prefer the more raspy, raw sounds of the earlier electronic organs to the smoother sound on Nonesuch. The Nonesuch version is 3 hours and 27 minutes; the Virgin version is a bit shorter.
Apologies accepted, of course. I think most people won't lead with their experience or credentials - I prefer not to, on the grounds that it's better to make my comments reflect my knowledge.
Thanks for the offer of posting space, which is good of you, but I will stick to my own blog for what passes for my thoughts.
Serious question: how can you tell a tonal composer is incompetently or incompletely trained rather than making deliberate decisions about his or her own version of tonality? I would not expect any current composer to be writing music in a strictly tonal idiom (if by that you mean Schenkerian tonality, which is pretty circumscribed).
I guess my question about what's left still stands. I think part of the answer is, perhaps, in what composers such as Ligeti, Dutilleux, Sariaaho, Ades, and others are doing (or have done); not serialist, not minimalist, obviously of the 20th and 21st centuries.
So many of us (myself included) can be so wrapped up in our own prejudices that objectivity becomes the first casualty of criticism. If I don't like something, I might call it incompetent; if I can't back it up, then I look bad, not the music I'm criticizing. Schoenberg writes wittily about this in his little essay on Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex".
Sometimes I think everything worth knowing is encompassed by that most magnificent compilation, "Style and Idea"; my ultimate "desert island" book.
Ligeti spoke eloquently about the problem of the contemporary composer when he said that he was caught between two traditions which were exhausted, the "tradition" (which foreclosed so many options by its sheer magnificence); and the avant-garde, which had become the "derriere garde". I think Ligeti was a great composer. "Le Grand Macabre" delighted me no end, and as for "Aventures" and "Nouvelle Aventures", what could be more delightful?
How does one tell competence from incompetence, while excluding the possibility of something being an intentional manipulation of the musical language that contradicts something like the proper use of a nomenclature, as represented by voice-leading, harmony, counterpoint, etc.? For me, not such a tough question. One is justified in asserting a view based on the possibility of a deduction of the aesthetic laws inherent in a composition, and an examination of the way in which these laws are applied. I don't admit chaos or arbitrariness. Composers for whom I harbor deep reservations include Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse, for instance, who to my taste apply tonality inconsistently and arbitrarily within the musical rhetorics they themselves have constructed.
Postscript: And as for George Rochberg? Egad!
This seems an interesting discussion. In Europe, minimalism is half-heartedly accepted, but indeed suffers from the same defects als modernism: a rather primitive technique. Some European composers - mainly young ones - try to get back to the roots of skill, but the tonal tradition as a living thing has disappeared and skills have to be dug-out from history: scores, some manuals, some isolated bits of casual information from historical biography. There is the Adler manual of course, and the Rosen books upon the classical style which are helpful. And as for orchestration the Berlioz/Strauss book and the Rimsky book, plus Piston, and Del Mar's 'Anatomy of the orchestra'. But reading about it is different from knowing how TO DO it. (For instance, most books on scoring are about ranges, colouring effects, but no mention about balance of sound mass.) A tradition has a number of basic norms and values, from which the individual artist starts, and which he enriches with his own deviations from the norms which always are related to the original body of practices (like Prokofiev!). Learning the craft takes a lot of time and 'the first 30 years are the most difficult'. The crucial thing is having the right mindset: what is the goal? There is an eplorative book 'Reviving the Muse' (Claridge Press UK 2001) which is wholeheartedly to be recommended: it explores various trajectories around the subject of how to restore serious music in the 21st century. It was badly received by the English modernist establishment, which is a good sign of offering some real content. (Chapters about Schoenberg's mistake, Schopenhauer and music, recreating the classical tradition, programming in the modern concert hall, and orchestral practices.) Another very helpful book which offers an extremely rich field of awareness of the tonal tradition as such: Roger Scruton's impressive 'The Aesthetics of Music' (OUP paperback 1999). Including the chapters: Imagination and metaphor, Expression, Language, Understanding, Tonality, Form, Content, Value, Analysis, Culture. Digesting this tome is acquiring a world of musical consciousness.
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