Month: March 2009

Mod squad

I’ve been feeling awfully lazy and unproductive lately, but I suppose it’s always a productive day when you can predate the Oxford English Dictionary. The word in question is atonal, which the OED dates in English from 1922:

1922 A. E. HULL in Musical Opinion Oct. 48/1, I have been working for two years at a system of non-tonal harmony, which I had long been unable to christen. Now, after visiting no less than seven foreign countries I not only find that the thing is widely known as Atonality, but [etc.]. Ibid. 48/3 Keyboard chord-writing as well as linear, tonal as well as Atonal.

Well, if the thing is already widely known, then maybe we’re not quite getting on that bandwagon early, are we? And, in fact, a little investigation finds the French-English critic M. D. Calvocoressi using the term a full decade earlier than that. From “The Origin of To-Day’s Musical Idiom” in the December 11, 1911 issue of The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular (writing about Mussorgsky):

A score and more of such examples could be quoted. Not only these soft ‘atonal’ harmonies, but also the harsher whole-tome scales and aggregates, much used by Debussy and other contemporaries, appear in several parts of ‘Boris Godounov'[.]

Calvocoressi was a member of Les Apaches, the group of French artistic young-men-in-a-hurry that also included Ravel and de Falla, making a musical splash by defending Pelleas et Melisande from its critics. So it’s interesting to find atonal soon being taken up by the composer-pedagogue Vincent d’Indy, one of those critics, as a bit of a cudgel. D’Indy’s 1912 article “Le Bon sens” isn’t online, but you can find the American composer Daniel Gregory Mason quoting it:

“In the nineteenth century,” [d’Indy] says, “some Russian composers, in the interest of certain special effects, employed the scale of Whole tones, which one may name atonal because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. In the twentieth century Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel elaborated these methods, making often very ingenious applications of them; but they made the mistake (one must dare to speak the truth of those one esteems) of erecting processes into principles, or at least of letting them be so erected by their muftis, so that the formula now established by fashion is: ‘Outside of harmonic sensation and the titillation of orchestral timbres there is no salvation.'[“]

Because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. You start to understand why, even given late-Romantic levels of dissonance, atonality so bothered the d’Indys of the world—dissonance was OK as long as the movement from key center to key center remained purposeful and perceptible, but lose that modulation, and things start to seem random. Debussy doesn’t seem atonal to us, but his penchant for using familiar chords (dominant 7ths, for example) for color rather than modulatory function must have exacerbated that modulatory uncertainty—in a Heisenberg-like way, in fact. D’Indy’s ideal Conservatoire ear could never correlate where Debussy’s music was with where it was going.

We should be on by now

A couple weeks ago, in preparation for reviewing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, I did something that most critics or performers have probably done when faced with a similar prospect: I listened to Rachmaninoff’s 1939 recording. I have it on a pretty good Naxos transfer which is now out of print, but as the link indicates, it’s not hard to find at all. Now think: this is the chronological equivalent of a critic/listener/performer in 1909 having access to a recording of Beethoven playing the “Emperor” concerto. Piano nerds, at least, don’t take Rachmaninoff’s recordings for granted—once you discover them, they and the scores end up their own synoptic Two-Source Hypothesis—but I don’t think we realize how much their existence says about our relationship with the musical past.

In fact, I think what Rachmaninoff’s recordings show—what the advent of recorded music shows—is that our perception of a musical past is, in many ways, an illusion. In general terms—

The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.

As information technology improves, the distance between past and present shrinks. You can make a taxonomy of musical examples. Nearly the entire corpus of surviving Ancient Greek music fits on a single web page, with tempo and tuning largely educated guesses. Chant and medieval music exists in more complete sources, along with more detailed instructions. Western classical music is documented in standardized notation and fuller contemporary accounts. Music written since 1900 has increasingly—an with increasing fidelity—been recorded by or, at least, under the guidance of the composer.

That brief rundown might be considered coincidental—the steady progress of information technology, directional over time, corresponding to how “old” a musical epoch seems to us. But much musical scholarship of the past century has been devoted to, in a way, improving the backwards compatibility of more rudimentary information technology. If we know more about how Renaissance music, or Medieval music, or Ancient Greek music is supposed to sound, it’s because scholarship has filled in gaps that make performers better able to assemble the existing instructions—notation and treatise—into realized music that exists in the present.

In other words, all music—regardless of age—is ideally immediate and timeless, and as the technology of reproducing music—regardless of age—improves, the “pastness” of music falls away.

I already see the two implicational poles of this with the digital reproduction and distribution of music—old music ceases to gain an advantage from the imprimatur of age, but also ceases to suffer in comparison with music of greater chronological novelty. (This is, I think, why concerted efforts to bring classical music into alignment with pop music, to make it “appeal to new generations,” always come off as tinny to my ear: they’re trying to solve a “problem” that’s fading away on its own, and, ironically, dating themselves—the technology advances faster than the solution.) As the reproduction converges on the fidelity and immediacy of live performance, and as those reproductions become ever-more immediately available, the “dead white guy” factor of classical music diminishes. It’s like Faulkner famously said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Here’s another card in this file, one I will almost certainly be returning to in the next few months. Brian Wilson finished his unfinished masterpiece, the aborted “SMiLE” album, in 2004, ending over thirty years of fan speculation via bootlegs and homegrown reconstructions. Nevertheless, additional bootlegs and reconstructions of “SMiLE” have continued to surface since 2004. Why? Because of information technology—the raw materials of the original “SMiLE” sessions, once released into the digital world, have proliferated such that anyone with Internet access has near-instant access to them. Fragments of music originally thought lost have made their own way, to the point where they’re constantly re-introduced into the present, refusing to be pinned down to 1967 or even 2004. Mahler’s piano rolls, Rachmaninoff’s 78s, studio tapes from the 1960s—they’re all here and now. And, as the present continually renews itself, only more so.