The wondrous powers of music  

This misguided piece by Miles Hoffman (via ALDaily) makes an impassioned plea for more consonance in contemporary classical music, apparently in the hopes that another Beethoven will suddenly arrive on the scene. But are there any pursuits today that we call art that aren't either progressing (ie modern) or looking ironically backwards (postmodern)? Only a couple paragraphs in he points out that it took 1000 years to get to the major triad, so clearly he understands the idea of innovation and progress in music. Can't he see that all the layering and harmonic ambiguity of the past few hundred years was eventually going lead to a point where the it would be impossible for some (or all) listeners to distinguish the underlying harmonic references -- and that at time the idea of harmonically atonal music would be an appropriate next step?

He brings up the Leonard Bernstein lectures in The Unanswered Question, which I probably should have included here, but which nevertheless contain some bizarre and misguided ideas of their own (in particular the embarassing forays into the then-new Chomskian universal grammar). Bernstein's lectures start off with the physics of sound (eg the harmonic series) and show how these undeniable physical properties line up with our Western system of functional tonality. The problem with this for Hoffman is that eventually the harmonic series includes all 12 tones in our scale and more, and composers were inevitably going to reach into the harmonic stratosphere for these tones and all the harmonic ambiguity that goes with them.

It might be instructive to look at jazz, where harmonically there hasn't been too much of the strictly atonal, despite the fact that much of it is completely tonally disorienting to many listeners and ends up feeling atonal. Maybe Hoffman wouldn't listen to it, but this music can still be understood by listeners because there are more formal properties to music than just harmony (rhythm being perhaps the most obvious) that serve as signposts and create meaning and feeling.

Similarly, in contemporary classical music tonal harmony might be set aside in favor of rhythmic or even textural elements that change in time to create tension and release. Composers even refer to this as a kind of expanded tonality, and in this expanded context you might say that there's really no such thing as atonal music, since music that didn't make use of some element to create tension, feeling, etc wouldn't be music at all. The fact that Hoffman can't hear these effects doesn't mean they don't exist.

For me the central point here is that while there are crucial physical properties of sound that influence us, the way we perceive this sound is largely determined by context and history. If contemporary classical music has failed as a marketable quantity or in the eyes of Miles Hoffman, it's not because the music is atonal, but rather because there hasn't been sufficient preparation in terms of building a contextual framework to help people understand where the musical part of the music is. Of course, this music does still have an audience, so there are people out there who have that framework, and that might well be good enough for composers. To the extent that someone needs to be blamed, I'd blame the popularity of other forms in America (lately the dominant cultural force in the world), institutional problems in classical music, and the critics -- always the critics! (My plea for a more descriptive and less pretentious music criticism is here.)