October 1, 2023
IDEOLOGY IS UGLY:
Recovering the Sacred in Music: The music of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener is the music of a new civilization. These composers have gone against the prevailing grain of the twentieth century for the sake of a greater love. (Robert Reilly, September 25th, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)
The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music's Dr. Kevorkian, Arnold Schoenberg, whose cure, the imposition of a totalitarian atonality, was worse than the disease--the supposed exhaustion of the tonal resources of music. Schoenberg's vaunted mission to "emancipate dissonance" by denying that tonality exists in Nature led to the successive losses of tonality, melody, harmony, and rhythm.Music went out of the realm of Nature and into abstract, ideological systems. Thus we were given a secondhand or ersatz reality in music that operated according to its own self-invented and independent rules divorced from the very nature of sound. Not surprisingly, these systems, including Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of mandatory atonality, broke down. The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 1, 2023 12:00 AM