quietmind
Active Member
Love your reasoning here around physics. Couldn't agree more.If you throw everything that governs music out of the window — or as much as can be thrown out anyway, because certain things, like sound and time, are obviously difficult to get rid of (unless you believe, as some great musical minds do, that music can also exist, in its fullest possible realisation, on the page) —, you inevitably end up with a degree of freedom so unrestrained that it robs everything of its meaning. That is what the traditional systems do: they give meaning, weight and purpose to all the musical elements that a composer works with. They establish hierarchies, lay out roadmaps, provide means to create direction, create the conditions for tension and resolution, and countless other things …
If you decide to do away with all that, and let absolute freedom rule instead, what are you left with? Well, pitches, dynamics, colours, time … but no way to organize it with any sense of meaning or purpose, never mind meaning or purpose that can be conveyed to the listener.
Towards the end of the 19th century and all through the first half of the 20th century, composers became increasingly aware of this. Hence the birth of all kinds of new ‘systems’ to regain or restore some form of control over what otherwise would be unmanageable meaningless chaos. (Other composers opted for entirely different buoy-like solutions like, for example, neo-classicsm, in order to stay afloat during that period.)
But what many of these newer systems lacked, suspicious as they were of anything inherited from the organized and orderly past, was a strong connection with the physics of music. The big difference between these newer systems and the traditional ones, as I see it anyway, is that the latter weren’t abstract concoctions designed to bring or reinstate (usually on a mostly theoretical or mathematical basis) some measure of order and meaning to musical building-blocks, no, the traditional systems themselves had to function within the confines of yet another system and one of even far greater authority: a sort of supra-meta ‘umbrella’ system, largely defined by the laws of physics, that had shaped music ever since it existed.
(All of this in the context of the Western music tradition obviously. Attempting to include non-Western traditions here as well would make things far too complicated.)
Take classic counterpoint for instance. Classic counterpoint is, on the surface, every bit as cerebral/intellectual/abstract a musical ‘system’ as any in recent times — often even more so, I would say — but with the important difference that counterpoint not only sets rules, but is itself also ruled by … nature itself. Serialism, for the most part, isn’t. Serialism is essentialy a theoretical artificiality without much intrinsically musical roots. It’s a brainchild, not a child of nature. You can never say that about (classic) counterpoint because even in its most extreme excesses, it remains firmly grounded by the laws of physics. Many of the things you can or can’t do in classic counterpoint aren’t determined by some arbitrary and abstract set of rules, but by physics.
It’s that umbrella of physics — overtones, consonance, dissonance, tonality, sympathetic resonances, etc. … or, even when tempered for practical reasons: tuning — that shapes and validates the old systems. Not entirely of course, but to a defining extent certainly. Many of the newer systems however choose to disregard all that, and therefore only exist on a strictly intellectual/theoretical/mathematical plane, rendering them, as musical systems, at once much less powerful and, in my view, also much less musically satisfying and expressive.
All of this isn’t meant to advocate a return to the old systems — far from it, "Hark for'ard, full speed ahead!", is what I say — but I do strongly believe that those old systems, by way of being, have a musical power (and thus appeal) that can’t really be replaced by anything else. Which is why I could never completely abandon them. I need consonances, otherwise my dissonances have no power. I need tonality because, apart from its inherent sensuousness and appeal, tonality is what gives meaning, weight and purpose to my atonality.
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Add to this the realm of psychophysics or psychoacoustics, that links the physical and perceptual dimensions and points to the ultimate musical impact on the listener's response.
On another note, thanks for describing how you process the piano. Going to give that a try.
I'd love to hear the piece too....
