What’s Wrong with the World

What a wonderful combination video and music. I'm afraid it is an indication of Philistinism, but the music reminds me just a bit of Korngold.

Which is meant as a compliment to the music, by the way.

Lydia: not to worry, Korngold is on the menu:

1952. Symphony in f-sharp.

Pure genius, from first note to last.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Steve,

Your video music posts are top notch -- for goofs like me who know way too much about modern pop and rock music and have only scratched the surface of the world of classical music, I have much to learn from a man of taste and discernment. Speaking of which, did you see/listen to Scruton's post on the morality of music:

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/february/soul-music/?searchterm=scruton

I thought of your work here when I came across the "article" and said to myself, why isn't Burton writing for AEI?

Korngold's Robin Hood: best film score of all time?

I love Walton too; his two symphonies should be repertoire staples, and the choral music is masterful. But can't we make a case for twentieth-century tonal music without categorically dismissing the entire modernist movement? I enjoy listening to composers like Walton, Korngold, Sibelius, or Duruflé, but I also enjoy listening to composers like Messiaen, Xenakis, Dallapiccola, and Berg, and I see no conflict in this.

It seems to me that Messiaen, in particular, is an absolutely essential figure for traditional Christians, given that his work is based almost entirely in Catholic faith and Thomistic philosophy. The music has a beauty all of its own, evoking eternity in a way no other Western music has since the Renaissance. It would be a pity if we ignored what composers like this have to say because of a mistrust of modernism, or atonality, or whatever.

Ewww! What's with the archer in shorts at :35?

Seriously, I liked Joshua Gilder's review of Robert Reilly's Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music:

When I was studying music some 50 years later, in the 1970s, my teachers were still promulgating the notion that it was only a matter of time and perseverance before audiences — not to mention the musicians themselves — would become habituated to the destruction of tonality and harmony inherent in 12-tone music. Like the new Soviet man, we'd give up our old possessions, in this instance, outmoded ideas of beauty, emotion, or even meaning, and discover, to use Schoenberg's own description, the "emancipation of dissonance."

It never happened, of course. Just as Soviet laborers used to pretend to work, while management pretended to pay them, modern music more often than not became a case of composers pretending to write music and audiences pretending to listen. Like Marxism, however, this didn't prevent serial music from becoming ever more entrenched in the universities and among the intellectual elites, including most music critics, who as arbiters of aesthetic value — and more practically, dispensers of prize money, awards, and academic positions — have extended the stultifying dominance of Schoenbergian noisemaking into the present century.

As Robert Reilly chronicles in Surprised by Beauty, however, there were always guerilla holdouts who never gave up on tonality, and in the past couple of decades increasing numbers of composers have thrown aside atonal dogma and dared, despite the hostility of critics and grant-givers, to write beautiful music once again. It is music replete with those old standbys of melody, harmony and rhythm, that reaches beyond technique to touch the heart and soul. It is a new music, of our time and place (not an anachronistic retread of old styles), that has the courage to aspire to greatness; and if you follow up on Reilly's very helpful CD suggestions — this is, after all, a buyer's guide as well as well as a collection of uniquely perceptive articles of musical criticism — you'll find that musical greatness is something these die-hard modern tonalists very often achieve. The recovery of modern music that Reilly promises in his subtitle is very much in full swing.

Reilly's columns in Crisis and on Inside Catholic have been a goldmine for finding listenable 20th century music and music by living composers. Ditto Music Web International's reviews of much overlooked 20th century concert music.

As Robert Reilly chronicles in Surprised by Beauty, however, there were always guerilla holdouts who never gave up on tonality, and in the past couple of decades increasing numbers of composers have thrown aside atonal dogma and dared, despite the hostility of critics and grant-givers, to write beautiful music once again.

I was there in the 70's and Reilly is basically correct, although people like George Rochberg were fomenting the revolution that would become neo-Romanticism. Rochberg's book, The Aesthetics of Survival, attempts to make the case that atonal music doers not correspond to human music as the brain does not process it as communication. He borrowed some of his ideas from the Silliman Lectures of John von Neumann, published posthumously, as the Computer and the Brain.

That being said, Western music is incomprehensible to certain tribes whose acoustical basis and language is totally different than ours. The concept of beauty may be related to how is listening to the music. It is a topic for discussion: are there universals in music? There are universals in aesthetics, but is how they are applied in music dependent on the background of the listener? I am not taking sides, just throwing out a topic for conversation.

The Chicken

Western music is incomprehensible to certain tribes whose acoustical basis and language is totally different than ours.

(I have hear that) Certain sounds in various languages are virtually unpronounceable to those of _other_ languages, in part because they apparently do not "hear" the sound appropriately, so they have difficulty reproducing it. Since their ears function pretty much the same way anyone else's do mechanically, one would have to suppose that the difference is in the way the brain processes the sound - i.e. a software problem.

If this is true in language, one would suspect that it is true with respect to other sorts of sounds as well, including music.

But this inability to process certain sounds effectively way seems to be a limitation, rather than simply a different sort of software: a good translator is good in part because they can HEAR all the nuances of sound of the different languages. The fact that one person can have mental software that adequately handles all the sounds correctly suggests that a non-translator's failure to process a sound for English is a limitation of their software.

I would speculate, then, that a gifted hearer could make musical sense of BOTH that isolated tribe's music, and Western music. Which suggests, to me, that the tribal inability to hear Western music isn't simply OTHER-oriented software, but is limited software. Just a guess.

Mr. Parsley: I don't think that there's any very serious sense in which Messiaen's music is "based almost entirely in Catholic faith," let alone "Thomistic philosophy."

Take away the titles, and the program, and it would never occur to anybody that there was anything particular "spiritual" going on here.

The average listener in search of something "evoking eternity" would do better to investigate Arvo Part.

If you "enjoy listening to composers like Messiaen, Xenakis, Dallapiccola, and Berg," - fine. Whatever.

If only the modernist musical intelligentsia had adopted your live & let live attitude.

But they didn't. They did everything in their power to destroy the reputations of the traditionalists. And they succeeded - for a time, at least - with disastrous results.

Tearing down is always so much easier and so much faster than building up.

Scott W.: the Agincourt sequence in Oliver's film could be accused of didacticism: the heavy armoring of the French is repeatedly contrasted with the light-to zero armoring of the English - the short shorts & bare legs of many of the longbowmen being an extreme case.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Robert Reilly is doing good work, and I wish I could be as optimistic as he is.

MC writes: "Western music is incomprehensible to certain tribes whose acoustical basis and language is totally different [from] ours."

On the other hand, the great East Asian nations - China, Korea, Japan - have taken to Western concert music like ducks to water. I'd be willing to bet that there are a great many more certifiable Mahler fanatics in China, today, than there are in Austria.

Go figure.

Tony, consider this a Rorschach test:
http://videosift.com/video/Smoke-on-the-water-Japanese-Version

On the other hand, the great East Asian nations - China, Korea, Japan - have taken to Western concert music like ducks to water.

True. I once made a recording of Western concert band music for Columbia records while in Japan. Part of this may be the development of a more cosmopolitan attitude in the East after WWII (which we won and then more or less forced Western aesthetics on the East - although the modern generation has live with the aesthetic for so long that it has become more natural).

As a note in proof: Oriental music has been nowhere near as assimilated in the West.

The Chicken

I also did not say that Western music was incomprehensible to most people in the world, only a very small subset, by way of illustrating a point about the relationship between language and acoustic processing in the brain.

The Chicken

Steve:

Surely you are being too hard on Messiaen? Listen to - or, far better, perform - his 'O Sacrum Convivium' and tell me again that his music is not deeply informed by Catholic theology, indeed crammed full of it. From the inside of his music - from, that is, the purest representation of the inside of his mind - I can tell that Messiaen was a profound mystic. Don't ask me to describe how I can tell; that would be like trying to tell you what color orange is.

Interpreting Messiaen sympathetically can indeed be challenging; but the same goes for, e.g., Meister Eckhart, or for that matter John of Patmos. The uttermost real, being perfectly orthogonal to our subfirmamentary coil, is ipso facto difficult for us to encompass.

Noise - and evil more generally - is also of course difficult to interpret and comprehend. So it is possible that the interpretative difficulty peculiar to Messiaen is due to the evil of modernism. But how then could even one of his modern pieces be suffused, as 'O Sacrum Convivium' is, with charity? Like any other creaturely phenomena polluted by evil, modern music too may be an instrument of Providence, and a means of grace.

Chicken:

... are there universals in music? There are universals in aesthetics, but is how they are applied in music dependent on the background of the listener?

If there are universals at all, then there are universals for everything, no? And, how musical universals are applied would necessarily depend upon the background of the listener, just as the instantiation of a universal is always influenced by the actual factors thereof.

Many years ago, the late music critic Irving Kolodin
stated that this composer's music was "more Korn than Gold".
Great quip, but I actually like his music very much.

Anybody curious about Messiaen's "O Sacrum Convivium" can hear a good performance here.

I stand by my story.

Messiaen's engagement with Thomism is clearest in the organ "Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte-Trinité" of 1969. No-one would claim, of course, that a listener without programme notes would be able to understand how the pieces relate to such titles as "La relation réelle en Dieu est réellement idéntique à l'essence", but my own experience listening to Messiaen is that the music is consonant with a Christian, and specifically Catholic worldview. To myself and to many other listeners, the Messiaen's music is among the best twentieth-century expressions of Christian faith, and thus has enormous emotional power. I was lucky enough to hear his opera Saint Francois d'Assise live in 2008, which was one of the most overwhelming concert experiences of my life.

The point of all of this is simply that it's possible to sincerely enjoy complex modernist music as well as more traditional tonal music. Enjoying some modernist music doesn't mean approving the tiresome narcissism of Schoenberg, or Boulez's shrill tirades against composers he didn't like, any more than listening to Wagner means approving anti-Semitism. So what if the "modernist musical intelligentsia" tried to discourage non-modernist composers? They're now all either dead or turned into doddering octogenarians. The battles of the 1980s are over, and the traditionalists won. What I'm suggesting is simply that we try to appreciate all twentieth-century concert music as best we can on its own terms, and avoid the trap of judging music based on ideology: either the rigid modernism of forty years ago, or the equally dogmatic anti-modernism of today.

"The battles of the 1980s are over..."

well, mostly...

"...and the traditionalists won."

no. They lost.

Everybody lost.