Criteria of New Music

"The furious listener who wrote to his radio station after hearing a performance of Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge saying that the piece had reminded him of atom bombs, whereas what he wanted from art was relaxation, exaltation, and edification, understood more in his subaltern repressiveness than the sophisticated connoisseur who simply takes note of such music and weighs up its merits in comparison to those of other products." [194]

"[T]he radicality with which a piece of music presents the various stations along its path from earliest to the latest coincides in great measure with its development." [192]

"Ever since Stravinsky, and also in certain phases of the most recent music, there has been recurrent talk of nondeveloping, static music, most immediately in connection with the kaleidoscopic play of tone color and motive. But all so-called static music is mere illusion as long as it is regarded externally and played off dogmatically against the principle of development." [190]

"[C]larity is not necessarily the same thing as unambiguousness. New music is familiar with ambiguous functional features, and perhaps it is through them that the composition becomes 'integral.' But even the ambiguities must be clearly realized compositionally. The work will fail where the surface of the music fails to explain its function and to interpret the musical content." [189]

"At any rate, the task of giving the music its momentum, its 'inner flow,' as Schoenberg called it, is much more difficult than in music in which the tonal reference system and the surface coherence relieve the composition of the labor of generating its own momentum from within itself." [188]

"Above all, it is the universality of elaboration, the resulting liquidation of the sonata, and the compulsion ot compose in sections of 'fields' that has rendered obsolete the purely dynamic principle of development. It has been replaced the relation of the fields to one another, and the balance among them." [186]

"Klee's comment that art starts at the point where the system no longer works, a comment which in an artist as methodical as Klee of course presupposes the system, is an insight that has not yet been appropriated by the latest generation of composers." [181]

"This preestablished disharmony makes it very hard to create the configurations that transmit tension. The model here lies, above all, in intervals of tension like the major seventh or the minor ninth, which have ceased to be taboo or to induce panic in the citizenry but have driven out the consonant intervals. In the process, however, they sacrificed their own tension, and since they enjoy equal rights with every other interval, they have been neutralized along with them." [179]

"In countless contemporary compositions on varying aesthetic levels one finds such things as irregular figures with the very smallest note values to express the abrupt or wild, as opposed to the even and tame. Not only is this expressive gesture so familiar that it scarcely delivers the shock it would like to, but even the question of its precise musical components has itself become a matter of indifference." [178]

"In spoken language, social coercion and the sclerotic nature of convention have become so powerful that they inexorably shackle even the insubordinate utterances of the individual. In contrast, the language of music can ate least draw strength from its own weakness -- its lack of precise definition." [176]

"Complains that things were different in other centuries, and the desire to recreate something like a universally binding language or music, are in conflict with the current state of composition, as well as the historical trend of the age in general." [175]

"The more consistent and rich a musical structure is ... the more surface identification marks are reduced." [174]

"What is needed now is the formulation of an objective concept of originality, independent of the accidental identity of the composer and of the alien desiderata of the marketplace." [173]

"[T]he composer's subjective originality is of little avail as long as it remains mere gesture and fails to find its way into the structure of the music." [173]

"Now, in isolation, of course, original ideas do not amount to much, especially the vulgar notion that some people think up melodies that have no occurred to anyone else." [172]

"To be sure, the music that was evaluated in terms of its original inspiration also retained an element of bourgeois emancipation, as opposed to stereotyped hierarchical rigidity. But it has long since degenerated into pseudoindividuatliy, the hit song with the melody that is just like all the others and yet stays n the memory thanks to a minimally distinct innovation, a trick, a 'gimmick'." [172]

"It is a mistake to set up a blunt opposition between the complex and the primitive, as is common in a hackneyed sociology with a collectivist outlook. Such a sociology tends all too easily to defer to a well-worn stereotype that accuses modern art of excessive complexity and unnaturalness, and looks to simplicity as a source of renewal." [169]

"Accordingly, a completely resolved, unproblematic piece of either the motor-rhythmic or monothematic type that disarms all criticism can be inferior to a badly fractured 'failure' that demands more from itself from the outset and whose fractures are themselves meaningful; in important works, indeed, the measure of failure itself becomes the measure of significance. Works of art are all the more profound, the more purely they bear the stamps of the contradictions that are implicit in their point of departure, their own possibilities." [168]

"[M]eaning, the spiritual dimension in music, is the kind of transcendence in which its immanent structures gradually culminate: it is more than the sensuous. Indeed, it is created by the dynamism of the sensuous, while not asserting anything other than what it is, what it moves, and what it negates." [163]

"Nowadays a well-harmonized piece is not one that ignores the fact that tonality ever existed, but one that specifically negates it; and by avoiding sonorities or structures borrowed from tonality, such music preserves them within itself through the very process of exclusion." [160]

"If, when confronted by a self-evidently senseless constructivist composition, one asks the composer to explain where the antecedent and where the consequent are in a particular phrase, or what the logical function of each note is, he will answer with talk about some parallel or other between pitch levels, volumes, lengths, timbres, and the like, all of which remain external to the flow of the music and are unable to create meaning as long as they fail to articulate the musical phenomenon itself. But to call composers to account in this way is unfair because musical meaning today can probably no longer readily capture in concepts such as antecedent and consequent that arise indirectly from particular kinds of musical material." [159-60]

"Anyone who opposes spirit and technology to each other in good bourgeois fashion is as far behind the times as the person who simply conflates the two, treating intellectual questions as wholly reducible to questions of manipulating material." [157]

"Needless to say, art has always played a role in scientific progress. Foolish though it would be to equate the two, it would be equally misguided to fall into line with what in American parlance might be called the 'escapist' belief that the more science and technology advance, the more art must retreat into a world of supposedly pure feeling and turn its back on the scientific spirit." [155]

"The work of art cannot crudely be equated to a thing that might subject the logic of its structure to any sort of proof, as for example one might ask whether an object which has a purpose fulfills that purpose." [155]

"[T]he truth is that modern society is so radically different from the conditions to which music history devotes its energies that every analogy drawn from history can be no more than an impotent Romantic gesture." [153-4]

"Whoever still places his trust in a discredited tradition and continues to muddle on in the style of the nineteenth century or simply copies the styles of long-defunct social conditions in a spirit of craftsmanship, while confusing the results with 'classicism' is no more on safe ground than is the latest prepared piano." [152]

"If an audience finds a contemporary piece pretty, and responds with a delicious tingling of the spine because it sounds pleasant or unfolds smoothly or captivates through similar qualities, all this is based largely on the compulsion to repeat, the pleasure of mere recognition: a regressive phenomenon, a piece of unresolved childhood, the very antithesis of the redemption of that childhood through art." [152]

"The fact that every possible variant of art can thrive simultaneously, and that they all somehow or other express the age -- the ghastly expression reflects the ghastly reality -- no more confers legitimacy on them than does the fact of mere existence legitimate anything." [152]

"This is above all the besetting sin of aesthetic pluralism, which is deluded into believing that every conceivable type of music can coincide with any other and with equal validity -- Schoeberg and his successors, Stravinsky, ultimately even Britten." [150]

"In reality there is an overabundance of compositions that are 'right' according to explicitly controllable arrangements, but wrong or senseless in artistic terms." [149]

"[T]he artistic principle of individuation has been intensified to the point where it colonizes every aspect of a work, so that every work, and each of its aspects, must be unique and no longer permits the wealth of deviations that were tolerated, even required, by a universal musical language capable of establishing its objective validity." [149]

"Aesthetic objectivity is itself a process, of which anyone who conceives of the work of art as a force field is aware." [148]

"Our search for musical criteria today should also proceed along much the same paradoxical lines; in other words, we should search for an experience of necessity that imposes itself step by step, but which can make no claim to any transparent universal law. Actually, we miss the point if, as is inevitable in language, we subsume the experience of necessity implicit in the concrete monads of the works under universal concepts, if, in other words, we posit something like rues where none can exist, but only an infinitely sensitive and fragile logic, one that points to tendencies rather than fixed norms governing what should be done or not done." [148]

"Whatever happens musically nowadays is problematic in he full sense of the word, that of a task that cries out for a solution, and one, moreover, in which the difficulty of finding a solution is inscribed in the problem. To treat music dialectically means to submit to this situation." [148]

"[T]onality drags to their door categories that had once been thought independent of particular materials of composition, but which turn out in fact to be intimately intertwined with tonality. This refers above all to categories of musical language and syntax: the traditional methods of constructing forms. Their familiarity seduces us into thinking of them as part of the general logic of music as such, and not just tonality. Nevertheless, they cannot simply be transported unscathed from the world of tonality into something newer. A first, crude idea can be gleaned from reference to the most important traditional form, that of the sonata. Proportion among different parts in the sonata referred fundamentally to proportion among the keys, a matter of modulation and harmony. As soon as the sonata form loses its substance in terms of harmonic content, it is left more or less hanging in thin air. It becomes a construct in the questionable sense that it no longer follows inexorably from the internal musical events, it t no longer coheres with them naturally, let alone harmonizes with them, but is imposed on the textures of sound from outside, organizing them as if from memory." [147]

"There is considerable force in the idea that the given language of music stands in need of reappraisal, that it has become problematic. It is not simply that traditional tonality has gone out of fashion and that anyone who considers himself up to date would be embarrassed to compose using such methods. The fact is, these methods have become objectively false. It is not possible to ignore the mental climate of the age. Even if a composer in the provinces has not learned of the fate of tonality, what he writes does not thereby retain its integrity; it is still flawed and incoherent from start to finish. This is the case with Sibelius's symphonies, perhaps the last ambitious products of tonality in Western art." [147]

"As soon as one starts to discuss music, one enters the realm of thought, and no power on earth has the right to silence this." [146]

"At present, the question of criteria in music is caught up in a polarity that is as sterile as it is problematic. On the one side are those who appeal to firm, even rigid values postulated externally, a kind of hierarchy in the style of the middle Scheler, and who aspire to make musical decisions through confrontations with such values. Such a fixed theory is massively contradicted by the history of music, which constantly proves that what claims to be purely natural turns out to have been the product of creative transformation. For the past few decades, such static value systems have been pleased to call themselves an ontology. The more arbitrary they are, the less they are able to do justice to the living movement of their object; and the more they owe their existence to subjective desire or the will to power, the more violently they claim absolute validity and unchallengeable authority. These thinkers can be contrasted with vulgar relativists who hold that nothing authoritative can be said about the quality of works of art and that there is no arguing about matters of taste, though they neglect the evidence that people incessantly quarrel about such matters and that such a thing as art education does exist." [146]

"If, nevertheless, reflections on criteria cannot always be translated directly into quarter notes and sharps, this is because, wherever music is to be taken seriously, it has undermined any simple relationship to its basic material." [145]

"The question of criteria by which to judge new music calls for reflection not directly on the criteria themselves, but on the methods needed to discover them, if we are to avoid the standard strategies of resistance. But we can scarcely begin by talking of methods as a matter of principle. For the methods cannot be separated from the subject and treated as something ready-made and external, but must be produced in the course of a process of interaction with their subject. In the first instance this means the term 'dialectics' as applied to music, to its intrinsic development and to the consciousness of it." [145]