Mutineers Against the Divine Right of Tonal Music

It’s funny how sometimes really bad journalism, and/or writing, can still be interesting. There’s a piece in the NY Times today about George Perle, a twelve-tone composer. The review/essay has been savaged, across the board, by all the music blogs out there that Alli and I have seen.

I’ve never heard of Perle before, but I find the history of modern music pretty interesting and the Times writer (Bernard Holland) uses the occasion of Perle’s 93rd birthday to reflect on the whole twelve-tone thing. I actually think his analogy of the 20th and the 14th centuries, in history and in music, is pretty cool. Twelve-tone certainly does seem to have turned out to be a dead end, artistically. Still.

If you’re interested in some of the rather angry reactions to this piece, you can try here and here. If I was Holland, I’d watch my back.

How did all this atonality business start? A number of 20th-century composers said that it was the necessary next step, that old ways of listening had worn themselves out. It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

The Webern, and music that constitutes Mr. Perle’s immediate heritage, is altogether new. It is as if music history in the mid-1920s had stopped dead in its tracks and started again from scratch. Composers of the Second Viennese School — Arnold Schoenberg, Webern and, to a degree, Alban Berg — were like mutineers against the divine right of tonal music. Serialism was their Pitcairn Island. Freedom to reinvent was one result, inbreeding another.

Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity….

It is interesting that Mr. Perle’s take on 12-tone music flourished just as space travel was coming along. He and eminent colleagues like Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter were our musical astronauts. They defied gravity and left Mother Earth behind. Music soared into space. Out there in the ether a minor second would sound just as peaceful as a major third. Laws were necessary, for with everything now possible, nothing was possible.

Schoenberg escaped the chaos of limitless choice with a system whereby the appearance and frequency of certain pitches followed a rational design, one that included turning rows of notes upside down, running them back to front and the like. Mr. Perle’s music thinks in a similar way but invents its own homing devices or tonal centers.

It all sounds suspiciously like the 14th century, one of the blackest moments in human civilization and a period that produced reams of musical counterpoint surreal in its density. It may not be overly fanciful to compare the Black Death to AIDS, or the three-dimensional musical crossword puzzles of monkish scholars to the Babbitt Piano Concerto that so bewildered audiences and critics at Carnegie Hall a few years ago.

Postwar prosperity helps explain how a musical style attracted so much attention and yet was listened to by practically nobody. As academia and cultural foundations flourished, composers could write music to please themselves and one another and still make a living. Unappreciated genius and the consolations of posterity were conveniently popular conceits. American fascination with science and engineering and disgust for a tired European tradition made serial music and other rule-bound procedures a great new adventure. As with space travel, its practitioners were select and its methodology graspable by a chosen few.

[From George Perle: Rocketing Into Inner Space, Defying Tonality - New York Times]

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Bloom Radio Now Broadcasting: Osvaldo Golijov — 25 Years: Retrospective — Dreams And Prayers Of Isaac The Blind, For Clarinet & String Quartet: Postlude: Lento, Liberamente — performed by: Kronos Quartet

UPDATE:

Be sure and read the comment below from Alli, who’s not only my wife but also a real live musicologist, and pretty smart too.