Perspectives of New Music Perspectives of New Music
Perspectives of New Music Perspectives of New Music
Perspectives of New Music Perspectives of New Music
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.53.2.0201?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Perspectives of New Music is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
TONALITY, MUSICAL FORM, AND
AESTHETIC VALUE
WALTER HORN
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
202 Perspectives of New Music
2. Many human beings are capable of picking out the local structure
in tonal music.
In this paper I shall assume the truth of these claims.5 That is, I shall
not contest the proposition that no listener—untrained or expert—can
pick out by ear the “local structure” of twelve-tone rows—as presented
either horizontally or vertically—in any of their versions (original,
inverted, retrograde, or retrograde inverted). I shall also assume that
many tonal works have local forms or structures that can be recognized
in the approved manner, at least by experienced listeners.
While I will return to these themes as we proceed, my main focus in
this essay will be what, if anything, may be inferred about the artistic
or aesthetic value of a piece of music if those two empirical claims are
supposed to be correct.
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 203
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
204 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 205
define them)13 and those who have argued that values aren’t properties
at all,14 let us abandon any hope of definition entirely here, and settle
for the lesser aim of simply trying to make clear how we shall use the
phrase. In a review of Eddie Prévost’s Minute Particulars, I made the
following remarks:
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
206 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 207
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
208 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 209
II
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
210 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 211
• It is entirely improvised.
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
212 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 213
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
214 Perspectives of New Music
III
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 215
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
216 Perspectives of New Music
How can the fact (if it is one) that an Evan Parker solo more
closely resembles a Cape Cod coastline, a hive of bees, or a Jackson
Pollack painting than does a Bach or Ellington cantata, provide
Parker’s music with any additional creds? Maybe the sole of my
shoe is also more similar than the Bach to the coastline or the hive:
what can that possibly prove about the artistic merits of my foot-
wear?42 For Borgo . . . it is simply taken as axiomatic that (i) being
analogous to something like “near chaos” or swarming behavior;
or (ii) explicitly referring to any such natural processes; or even
(iii) being a reproduction of some—say, a recording of brain-
waves, frog chants, or plant behavior—will necessarily garner for
any “musicking” the much sought-after property of “emergence.”43
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 217
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
218 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 219
IV
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
220 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 221
If all this is so, why has there been so much concern about any
compositional method that seems somehow “artificial”? Why does
there seem to be something suspicious about Schoenberg’s prescrip-
tions, the use of computers, the hunt for fractals, and the tossing of
sticks? It is my view that this attitude comes from the fear of being
defrauded. Raffman warns us that with atonal music the performers
may well be engaged in “empty musical mugging” 58 when they seem
to be expressing themselves or the music. We can almost hear her
whisper, “Don’t be taken in!” Cavell notes that this fear is far from
new. He tells us that Tolstoy, a man who hunted deeply and
persistently for marks of sincerity, concluded that all of the following
gentlemen were heavily involved in the big con: Beethoven, Brahms,
Wagner, Michelangelo, Renoir; the Greek dramatists, Dante, Shake-
speare, Milton, Goethe, and Ibsen.59 No doubt there are perils on
either side of “But the emperor is naked!” debate.60 But Cavell
maintains that we must ignore the dangers and take a stand on one
side or the other. If we know that “even a child” might have made
some celebrated drip painting, field recording, or drone piece; if a
computer could make a twelve-tone work within minutes with the help
of random number generation, Cavell tells us that we must ask “How
is this to be seen? What is the [artist] doing?” “The problem,” in
Cavell’s words, “is not one of escaping inspiration, but of determining
how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or
satisfactory, how he can mean this.”61 For Cavell, it is only by
answering such questions that we can determine whether something
deserves the name of “art.”
But isn’t all of this worry about being deceived by tricksters just
another artifact of the poietic fallacy? Instead of asking questions about
how something was built, whether it fosters communitarianism, or
what was intended to be conveyed by its creator, couldn’t we learn to
trust our own aesthetic responses instead and consider all that other
stuff—however interesting—just (tasty, tasteless, or over-salted) gravy?
Why must those at the premiere of Rite of Spring who were moved to
rock out compulsively be embarrassed if it later turns out that the piece
was made by a computer or a seven-year old child? And why should
anyone believe that they have discovered that the piece was better than
previously thought if it turns out that there’s a perfect double fugue in
there somewhere (and swell with pride if they noticed this feature all
by themselves)? Again, I don’t suggest that all of these other matters
are or should be entirely extraneous to our appreciation, that
consideration of them cannot enhance or detract from our aesthetic
experiences. I simply insist that they must be seen as secondary: they
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
222 Perspectives of New Music
can’t make a bad piece good, or a good piece bad. Whether or not
particular facts about the origin of a work obtain and have had their
effects on the resultant music, the aesthetic value of an artwork is not,
strictly, a function of the intention to utilize or abstain from a par-
ticular compositional technique. The goodness or badness of a piece is
neither because of nor in spite of such intensions, except, of course, to
the extent that their implementation (whether correct or incorrect)
happens to make the music-as-heard better or worse.
Cavell tells us that Tolstoy and Nietzsche agreed on many of the
signs of fraudulence: “a debased Naturalism’s heaping up of random
realistic detail, and a debased Romanticism’s substitution of the
stimulation and exacerbation of feeling in place of its artistic control
and release; and in both, the constant search for ‘effects.’” Wariness of
such elements has continued.62 The use of birdsong, from Beethoven
to Delius and from Messiaen to the maker of a field recording, seems
to be a case of ever-increasing “realistic detail.” But any decrease in
what might be called “symbolic distance” in recent music is not found
only in the portrayal of nature’s apparent indifference to human
artifice. Where once a viol and shawm were used to depict the pain of a
mourning parent, now a recording of an intensely keening mother may
be heard floating above a string quartet in an attempt to intensify our
empathy with human sufferers. Whether or not the birds were easy to
tape or the recording of the mother constitutes her exploitation, must
either represent a debasement of the music itself? If so, it must also
have been debasement when Ives depicted the sound of separate
marching bands crossing paths on a road, not by allusion, but by
simply having two pieces in different keys and time signatures played
simultaneously, or when Biber required the insertion of paper into
violin strings to imitate drumming. If sights or sounds of nature are
among the most beautiful, inspiring, or saddest things we encounter in
our lives, why would we expect composers not to continue to mimic
them in ever-new ways? And if the results continue to bring something
of the non-composed—indeed entirely non-artificial—world back to us
as we listen, well . . . that’s a good thing, right? Surely we ought not to
ignore our feelings of appreciation for what Hall identified as
(approximately) the appropriateness of the aesthetic surface to the capture
of our object emotions because we disapprove of the composer’s means
or theories. Indeed, won’t increasing our focus upon the difficulty or
ease of creation or other compositional matters end up by making our
emotional responses largely irrelevant? In fact, if difficulty of construc-
tion or intent to defraud are crucial to the determination of artistic
value, it seems we should be hiring investigators, taking depositions, or
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 223
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
224 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 225
with them. In fact, that very frustration was the main impetus for this
paper. How much does it matter if a canon in Roussel’s Third or
Shostakovich’s Fourth is constructed as Fux or Schenker would have
liked or if these later composers actually cheated a bit here and there?
Are musical creations necessarily better if they don’t stray from
accepted forms at any point? Or, restricting ourselves to Raffman’s
local structures, why should it be thought that the absence of a home
key must still produce endless discomfort in every listener in the 21st
Century? Even if we concede that a V-I cadence is “naturally” tension
reducing, can’t people have later come (perhaps through weariness of
hundreds of years’ use of this “natural” phenomenon) to instead find
themselves calmed first by Ives’s Unanswered Question, a written out
Tournemire organ improvisation, or Webern’s pointillism (and still
later find comfort in the icy sonorities of Ligeti’s Lontano, the
ferocious, atonal hammering of Cecil Taylor’s solo performances, or a
faint, undecipherable background radio broadcast in a performance by
AMM?64 Neither being “natural” nor being “correct” provides an
unerring path to musical serenity, let alone aesthetic merit. A Picardy
third, beloved by someone when she is twenty, may have become to
her the equivalent of a (“naturally” irritating?) fingernail squeak on a
blackboard by the time she has turned forty.
Clearly, Diana Raffman does not enjoy atonal music (or at least did
not in the early 2000s). That is (or was) her privilege. She has not,
however, either discovered a necessary defect or uncovered a pervasive
fraud in this despised subgenre. She has merely attempted to justify her
distaste by suggesting that it is founded on both science and reason.
But the science is junk and the reasoning is bad. Let me not be overly
harsh here, however. Raffman may console herself in the fact that in
this sphere there will never be any science or reasoning that is
competent to the task she has in mind. Values, both moral and
aesthetic, are nearly identifiable by their resistance both to scientific
investigation and philosophical proofs. At any rate, for my own part,
Ich habe genug! Let there be an end to all this absurd and largely
fallacious theorizing! Let us just listen!
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
226 Perspectives of New Music
NO T E S
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 227
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
228 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 229
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
230 Perspectives of New Music
24. Raffman, 86. Obviously, Raffman’s claim would not be quite right
even if her contentions about linguistic similarities were correct,
because, surely, one can try to express something but (unin-
tentionally) use inappropriate means for the task. That is,
fraudulence would seem to require an intent to deceive, and ought
not to be alleged merely on the basis that one has used ineffective
media for the production of some effect.
25. Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in
Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976), 84. Cavell seems to conclude that, where there are
no touchstones of tonality present, the answer to the “But is it
music?” question is largely a function of whether the piece is
intentionally fraudulent. I shall discuss the accusation of fraud
perpetration in Section IV.
26. Alan H. Goldman, “Value,” in The Routledge Companion to
Philosophy and Music, ed. Kania and Gracyk (London: Routledge
2011), 155–164.
27. Ibid., 161.
28. Ibid.
29. There is a current top-ten radio hit (“All of Me” by John Legend
and Toby Gad) whose lyrics contain the following consecutive
lines: “What’s going on in that beautiful mind? I'm on your
magical mystery ride.” These lines make two extremely trite pop
culture references, but my fourteen-year-old daughter was not
familiar with either the Beatles album and song or the book and
movie about John Nash until I mentioned these facts to her. Her
appreciation of the song was increased as a result of this
“esoterica.” We could refuse to call such appreciation aesthetic,
but I believe it would be quite difficult to make any sensible
distinction about what counts as aesthetic pleasure that excludes
recognition of “extra-musical quotations” but includes recognition
of, for example, an insertion of a melodic passage from Bach or
Cole Porter. Such exclusion would likely make the appropriateness
of a “setting” of a poem or libretto aesthetically irrelevant.
30. Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,”
118.
31. Ibid.
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 231
32. Ibid., 118–120. Although Lerdahl is not clear about this, I take it
that the potential of some piece to tax our “grammatical” capa-
bilities to the limit is again considered only a necessary, and not a
sufficient, condition for that work to be of high aesthetic merit.
33. Ray Jackendoff, “Music and Language,” in Gracyk and Kania, The
Routledge Companion, 111.
34. Ibid., 111–112.
35. Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity (Feb.
1958).
36. Richard Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy,” in The Danger of Music
and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009) 319–320.
37. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Twentieth Century Music, World
University Library (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 203.
38. Taruskin, “No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage,” in
The Danger of Music, 261–279.
39. Taruskin finds a similarity between the sound of Boulez’s Structures
for Two Pianos and Cage’s Music of Changes and believes he has
uncovered the reason for it: “What both composers accomplished
with these works was the replacement of spontaneous compo-
sitional choices—choices that, in Cage’s oft-incanted phrase,
represented ‘memory, tastes, likes and dislikes’—with transcendent
and impersonal procedures. . . . The difference between Boulez and
Cage was only superficially a conflict between order and anarchy.
It was, rather, a conflict between disciplines, both eminently
authoritarian, both bent on stamping out the artist’s puny person
so that something ‘realer,’ less vulnerable, might emerge. Cage’s
‘chance operations, very rigorous and very tedious, were just as
effective a path to transcendence as Boulez’s or Babbitt’s
mathematical algorithms” Ibid., (264).
40. I find it amusing that while Goldman finds ultimate support for his
defense of (apparently algorithm eschewing) tonality in Hegel:
“Music . . . represents the purest kind of Hegelian overcoming of
matter by mind, the purest expression of the creative human
spirit”(Value., 164), Taruskin lays most of the blame for what he
considers Schoenbergian and Cagean confusions right at Hegel’s
feet. These errors are claimed by Taruskin to be a direct result of
the “Hegelianization” of music history (Taruskin, The Danger of
Music), 301–329.
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
232 Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 233
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
234 Perspectives of New Music
the tonal system, to the point where certain aspects of tonal form
are inextricable from tonality. Similarly, the twelve-tone system
possesses its own particular form generating tendencies, based on
the sorts of relationships available within it. However, given the
wide range of strategies available in each system, it is not incon-
ceivable that there may be an intersection of the two systems’
strategies which might lead to a degree of similarity that would not
belie the integrity of either tonality or the twelve-tone system.”
“‘Tonal’ Forms in Arnold Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music,”
Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987), 92.
58. Raffman, 85.
59. Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say,
193.
60. Cavell notes that Saint-Saëns thought Rite of Spring was a base
trick and ended up stripped of dignity himself.
61. Ibid., 205–206.
62. In his contribution to David Cope’s colloquy on computer
creation of works in the style of Bach, Daniel Dennett notes that,
“Many find this vision of creativity deeply unsettling. Some would
add that it is . . . crass, shallow, philistine, despicable, or even
obscene.” “Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble,” in
Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001) 283.
63. Consider again the effect that particular row choices have had in
Berg. Scruton has written that in that composer’s Violin Concerto,
“the serial organization is subverted by the use of a tone-row
which divides into two distinct and clearly tonal regions: G minor,
and B major/F sharp major. And from the outset the serial
structure is submerged by the surface elaborations. There is a
melodic movement, beginning in the first motif on arpeggiated
fifths, that sustains itself through repetition and parallelism, and
causes us to hear tonal harmonies even in the most discordant of
the orchestral chords. When the music comes home at last, to the
lovely prayer in which Berg quotes from Bach’s setting of ‘Es ist
genug,’ it comes home also to the second tonality of the tone-row,
and uses all the devices of triadic tonality.” Scruton, The Aesthetics
of Music 298–298. Obviously, one can’t “subvert” tone rows with-
out consideration of their pitch orders and how they will be used.
Another example of the effect of twelve-tone choices on the feel of a
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 235
This content downloaded from 193.170.129.228 on Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:17:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms