Music's Philosophy

Once upon a time, the composer Dimitri Shostakovich, no doubt prodded by his Socialist-Realist patrons, declared: "There is no music without ideology". Right then, all he had intended to say was that the meaning of his work could be found in the basic propositions of the ideology that informed the society in which he lived. However, he said something much deeper than that: There is no such thing as generic music.

Each style of music originated in a specific part of the world, at a specific stage of historical development. Mozart, were he to be born in India thousands of years ago, would not have written any Church music. Beethoven, born twenty years ago, would probably be a radical Jazz-Rock Fusion artist with no chance or intention of ever composing either the Eroica or the Ninth... The very forms of music are conditioned by the historical evolution of society: there would be no Magnificats or Requiems without the whole background of Christianity. The larger-than-life Symphonies and Concerti, which make up the heart of the standard repertoire, are an idealization of the possibilities for human growth and fulfillment that had just become possible in the new Nation-States of the modern West.

Rock music carries with it a philosophy of life just as surely as does Muzak. When we consider the careers of people who specialize in the different style periods of classical music, such as Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Twentieth Century, we meet with groups of people who deliberately cultivate art forms from the past, right in the middle of our post-modern whatever.

To what extent does a full-time devotee of one of the branches of classical music alienate himself spiritually from the surrounding society? An artist or student who spends all his working hours practicing and meditating upon Bach, let's say, is also, subliminally absorbing Bach's value system, in some as-yet undefinable way. Yet, for all the truly awesome advances in the field of historical performance, the fact remains that we shall never, ever, be able to hear Bach's music exactly as he heard it: Our radically different Zeitgeist will see to it.

Could it be that part of the endless attraction that the art forms of the past have for us post moderns is precisely that they allow us, temporarily, to live in a different period of history, to think and feel differently? For the more mystically minded, it would be as a regular consultation with some kind of oracle, some kind of timeless repository of wisdom from which useful lessons may be gathered to be used in the here and now.

As a matter of fact, music composers do it all the time. Almost every composer of note since Bach has studied and re-studied his works in order to "fortify" him/herself for the labors of the present. We may think of the whole history of music as a kind of colossal bridge built across the abyss of time, each builder carefully considering how to join his part to what already exists. No one knows what lies at the other side of the great divide: there is just this supra-rational imperative to keep adding to the collective superstructure.

Alone among the differnt art-musics of humankind, Western music developed a writing system that has allowed very complex thought-structures to travel intact through time, regardless of the vagaries of history. Even if all generations share the same symbols on the page, there are endless ways to interpret them, and this is what justifies the existence of conservatories everywhere. There are many traditions of interpretation, each one claiming to be the closest to the spirit of its cult object. The great masters of the past are so far away from us now that they have become mythologized, and conservatories are their churches. In this sense, we might rightly say that the different expressions of "Classical Music" are Yoga, the Zen of the West.

The consensus has existed for centuries about the extent of the "Canonical" texts. Their study takes a lifetime and the actual performance of the scores is just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-nine percent of the time and of one's mind energy is invested in practicing, in preparing for that moment, and, beyond that, in actually meditating upon the canonical text.

However, most of today's devotees are unable to either improvise or compose. The reason is very simple. There is no definite style today with clear and precise do's and don'ts like during the golden eras of the past. It is possible to improvise today only by taking elements from the different styles, or by following the procedures of Jazz. The great value of Jazz resides precisely in that it makes people improvise according to specific tonal principles. There is no anarchy in Jazz. Maybe from it we may eventually expect a Renaissance of composition. All the great composers of the past were improvisers. In terms of music history, we can say that it is the consensus of many minds that creates the accepted style-language of the age: for as long as that consensus holds, it will be impossible for a composer to express him/herself without making reference to that style-language. Even if the style-language derives its materials from "nature" it is only the collective psyche of the age that gives it life. Within that living style-language, the composer may navigate freely and create hundreds, and even thousands of works; he is like a farmer working on fertile soil. The only reason why today it is so difficult to compose, is that the collective psyche of the age has not reached the consenseus necessary for the birth of a style-language.

One of the most stimulating books I ever read was "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg" by Joseph Chilton Pearce. As a young man I was simply blown over by what I considered mighty revelations. Pearce wrote that we live in a semantic universe. Our value systems are the only real universe we live in. Whatever universe exists out there, even if it does have an independent existence of its own, can be modified and, to an extent, re-created by the psyche, provided certain conditions are met. For out limited purposes, it is the action of the collective psyche that creates and maintains the musical universe of the ever changing present moment.

When it comes to musical preferences, it is simply impossible to love everything equally. For a human being to actually believe in any style of art music, his/her brain has to be wired in such a way that the experience of performing and/or listening to the music will elicit all the requisite associations. Subconsciously there will be a tacit acceptance of extra musical values that form the background of the style-period. In addition, the whole package will have to be adjusted to the listener's personality. What this person will actually hear will not be the same music another person will, even if both belong to the same culture and have compatible values. Even within the musical profession we do not hear equally: violinists hear horizontally, pianists hear vertically. Composers can tune out the many small details of the ever-changing musical present moment, in order to focus on the general, large-scale framework of the work they are listening to.

Only repeated hearings of any work allow the listener to comprehend the large-scale form. This is as true of veteran musicians (on a fully conscious level) as for the most casual listeners (for whom the perception of form still exists, albeit subconsciously). It is simply not possible to derive lasting, artistic satisfaction from any work of art-music until its Gestalt has become clear, whether consciously or unconsciously. People with little or no musical education derive a purely sensual satisfaction from easily remembered tunes, lively rhymic patterns or exhuberant coloristic effects. They are missing something infinitely more important: The large-scale form; the specific micro-universe that holds all those tidbits together, having given birth to them.

Now we can understand why audiences are reluctant to try new composers, or even unknown composers from the known past. There would be much mental work to do in order to assimilate all that new material. When we hear a composition for the first time, we are listening for information, musical information. When we hear the classics of the Western Cannon, we engage in a ritual, a procedure that reassures us that the Universe is not wholly unknowable.

Even if the system of musical writing has remained more or less the same through the ages, it does not hint at the more basic infrastructure of any musical enterprise: Tuning. Every major period of Western musical history has seen a different system of tuning predominate. In the Middle Ages it was the PythAgorean tuning; the Renaissance saw the rise of the Mean-Tone temperaments. The Baroque era brought a profussion of well-tempered systems, and our age has been ruled by Equal Temperament roughly since 1850. Whether we tune our instruments according to the standard Equal Tempered system (A 440) or we choose one of the historical temperaments, this choice will have momentous consequences for the music. Mathematically, all the ratios are altered, and I am sure that that in itself has its effect on the central nervous system and on the subconscious mind. The point is not that X temperament is more "correct:" the point is that for each one of us, isolated in the vastness of our semantic universe, one, and only one, temperament is the correct one. (There is always the possibility of metanoia, or conversion.) It happened to me. I detested Baroque specialists, and their playing sounded out of tune to me. After a few years of tuning and playing harpsichords, I am unable to tune my piano in equal temperament. I just can't!

Moshe Knoll, mosheknoll@yahoo.com