GETTING THE PAST OUT OF THE WAY:

Is Music Sacred? (Robert R. Reilly, September 1999, Crisis)

Music's self-destruction became logically imperative once it undermined its own foundation. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unleashed the centrifugal forces of disintegration in music through his denial of tonality. He contended that tonality does not exist in Nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras claimed, but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention. This assertion was not the result of a new scientific discovery about the acoustical character of sound, but of a desire to demote the metaphysical status of Nature. Schoenberg was irritated that “tonality does not serve, [but rather] must be served.” He preferred to command. As he said, “I can provide rules for almost anything.”

Schoenberg took the twelve equal semi-tones from the chromatic scale and commanded that music be written in such a way that each of these twelve semi-tones is used before any one of them is repeated. If one of the semi-tones is repeated before all eleven others are sounded, it might create an anchor for the ear, which could then recognize what was going on in the music harmonically. The twelve-tone system guarantees the listener’s disorientation.

Schoenberg proposed to erase the distinction between tonality and atonality by immersing man in atonal music until, through habituation, it became the new convention. Then discords would be heard as concords. As he wrote: “The emancipation of dissonance is at present accomplished and twelve-tone music in the near future will no longer be rejected because of discords.” Of his achievement, Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” This is nowhere more true than when he declared himself “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This statement represents a total rupture with Western musical tradition and is terrifying in its implications when one considers what is at stake in beauty. Simone Weil wrote: “We love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good.” All beauty is reflected beauty. Block out the reflection and not only is the mirror useless, but the path to the source of beauty is barred. Ugliness, the aesthetic analogue to evil, becomes the new norm.

The loss of tonality was also devastating at the practical level of composition because tonality is the key structure of music. Tonality is what allows music to express movement away from or toward a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion through a series of crises and conflicts, which can then come to resolution. Without tonality, music loses harmony and melody. Its structural force collapses. Gutting music of tonality, as Schoenberg did, is like removing grapes from wine. You can go through all the motions of making wine without grapes, but there will be no wine at the end of the process. Similarly, if you deliberately and systematically remove all audible overtone relationships from music, you can go though the process of composition, but the end product will not be comprehensible as music. This is not a change in technique; it is the replacement of art by an ideology of organized noise.

Schoenberg’s disciples applauded the emancipation of dissonance, but soon preferred to follow the logic of the centrifugal forces that he had unleashed. Pierre Boulez thought that it was not enough to systematize dissonance in twelve-tone rows. If you have a system, why not systematize everything? He applied the same principle of the tone-row to pitch, duration, tone production, intensity and timber — every element of music. In 1952, Boulez announced: “Every musician who has not felt — we do not say understood but felt — the necessity of the serial language is USELESS.” He also proclaimed, “once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.”

Which may as well be the motto of gay marriage advocates.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2004 6:55 PM