Thursday, 20 September 2007

Thoughts of Art and Music in a 21st Century World
Imagine that kind of post on THIS Xanga...

In all sincerity, it's a topic that I have been thinking about recently. I've spent the better part of three years and am now into a fourth year studying to be a good enough musician that I can teach others. In doing so, I've spent many, many hours around other musicians and have been exposed to a lot of different music in class, at performances, looking at scores, and just listening to music itself.

Two major topics musicians study at the baccalaureate level for a music degree are theory and musicology. I spent two and a half years studying theory and have almost finished a second year of studying musicology (more historical than scientific). One of the things I've learned is obviously how much music in the Western tradition has evolved from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century. In the 20th Century with the advent of post-tonal music, it reached a point where now, if you use the right justification(s), just about anything can be defined as music. Case and point: a composer named György Ligeti actually wrote a "piece" for one hundred metronomes to be set in motion. He called it "Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes." It honestly sounds like popcorn in a popper to me. A bunch of cacophony.

I bring this up because of a recent post I read. Nik recently posted an entry in his Xanga about studying and living in New York City this semester (thus far). It was great to read how my friend's enjoying it. He mentioned in particular how much he enjoys seeing a good painting in the art galleries by a great such as Rembrandt or Klimt. I understand where he comes from-nothing hits a musician harder than when the performer(s) really knock the audience's socks off with an iconic work. Nothing could quite describe the feeling I had when the Westminster Choir finished Samuel Barber's "Agnus Dei" when I went to see them. It really was breathtaking.

But what captured my attention in Nik's post was the flip side of his statement. He's seen other kinds of art in New York as well. He has described his reaction as "disgust" and is unafraid to label some of the art as "garbage." Strong terms indeed. He called it "garbage that gets disguised by clever words or trends."

That sounds familiar to me as a musician. It made me ponder: is some of this post-tonal music really garbage like the bad art Nik has seen in New York? I think back to Music Lit last spring and especially Theory II spring of sophomore year and some of the nutty stuff I had to endure. Intellectually and looking at the scores, I was able to understand it, but I absolutely cannot stand listening to stuff like motivic atonality and twelve-tone pieces. It sounds unpleasant and chaotic.

I'd place that aural nonsense with Nik's garbage art. Music is aesthetic. It isn't merely complex, cerebral ideas carried out by smartypants composers who put flyspecks on paper and proclaim, "This is music!" Music has beauty. True, the intelligence behind some post-tonal pieces is amazing. One small set of pitches can create an entire piece (usually it's very short). But it takes a fair amount of dissecting and analysis to fully appreciate this fact. I can't just take it in and enjoy what the composer wrote. Though I am a trained musician (and almost a "professional"), I take issue with that.

I say that's where post-tonal composers SEVERELY lack what someone truly brilliant like Beethoven was able to accomplish with his music. He pulled the exact same stunt (using a small set of pitches), only he composed a whole symphony off one little idea and made it aesthetically pleasing as well. It reached "normal" people as well as the musically intelligent. And what's more, if you dissect music of composers such as Beethoven and Bach with the same kind of detail that you do with post-tonal music, that reveals a whole new level of genius behind the music we can simply listen to and call "beautiful." I call Schoenberg and Webern "witty." They don't deserve to be labeled "genius." Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (as three examples) deserve that title. They were blessed with great minds and the music they left behind proves they earned the title "genius."

I think why Nik's post caught my attention is the fact that he as a well-trained artist is still unafraid to take a stand and go so far as to call something "garbage" that someone else calls "art." Especially now, when artistic movements (at least in music) have come to a sort of free-for-all point, it seems that everything can be art or music. But I think I agree with Nik. Not everything out there is art and not all sound out there is music, no matter how you argue it. Some of that stuff really is just plain garbage.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, now THAT'S music. There's the ultimate example of taking a four-note idea and writing music from it. Setting off 100 metronomes at once is what you do when you're bored, it's raining outside, and you want to annoy everyone in the house in a Dr. Seuss fashion.