Why Musicians Need Philosophy
futuresymphony.org
futuresymphony.org
Schoenberg was engaged in an experiment. His polemic was not an absolute statement on the future of music, but a hypothesis. It is a framework for experimentation, like the Dogme 95 movement in film. The point of an artistic manifesto is to push a particular idea to an extreme and see what happens.
To quote Vi Hart: "It's a tool for breaking free of old musical habits ... to get your brain to stop following the same, well-worn neural pathways and think something you haven't thought before."
Schoenberg's legacy wasn't a generation of musicians who dogmatically stuck to serialist principles, but a generation who had a deep intuition about the limits of tonality. Eisler studied under Schoenberg, combining serialist ideas with jazz and folk music. He created some of the most remarkable and powerful music of the 20th century.
The work of the classical avant garde fed into jazz in a profound way. George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation was integral to some of the most important jazz works of the post-bop period. Most notably, that includes Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, by far the most popular and accessible jazz album of all time.
Music is a conversation played out over centuries, a back-and-forth of ideas. Sometimes a conversation needs polite consensus, sometimes it needs daring new ideas, sometimes it needs someone to say "this is all bollocks".
Music needs people like Schoenberg, just as software needs people like RMS. The progress of culture depends on the grand pronouncements of obsessive lunatics.
Maybe culture also needs people like Roger Scruton, for the same kind of reason.
First the title,
"Why Musicians Need Philosophy"
"Why Musicians Need [An Aesthetic] Philosophy [to understand and counteract the Modernist Philosophy]"
To support his position, he's claiming that something like the diatonic scales with its divisions is deeply rooted in humanity and not purely arbitrary culture. One can create music that works with this, or one can go "meta" and deliberately avoid it (e.g. atonal for ambiguity's sake). John Cage's "4'33"[1] seems to be the common go-to example of meta music.
This same type of "meta" philosophy argument can be applied to art and literature. Art that "obviously" pleases the eye (such as Michelangelo and da Vinci) isn't all there is to art. The artists can "break the 4th wall" (aka "meta") and push the boundaries of abstractions. The art can draw attention to its medium and materials or try to ignore it. An artist can put a rectangle on the wall with a layer of silver particles covered by a sheet of glass and insist this is art. You as the viewer just see "a ordinary mirror". The artist (and his high-brow allies) then explains that you don't "get it" because there's more to the "reflection". You can see your face in an infinity of Mona Lisas etc. You as a viewer should not be constrained by a "canvas" or "pigments". Other examples might be a plain white canvas with a single dot in the middle. Or it could be a painted line -- and it happens to sell for $44 million[2]. The famous urinal[3] is another piece that invites analysis and commentary. Is all of this "art"? Or "philosophy" packaged as art? You decide.
Discussing avante garde art/music/literature can get really weird and you don't know if people are trolling each other with Poe's Law.[4]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
[2]http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-white-l...
For example:
> Very few composers have philosophical gifts, and fewer still attempt to justify their music in philosophical terms – the great exception being Wagner, who, despite his vast literary output, always allowed his instinctive musicianship to prevail when it conflicted with his philosophical theories.
How did Wagner justify his music in philosophical terms? Why did he even feel the need to justify it? What would such a justification look like? What would a competent justification look like? How can I identify a composer who has philosophical gifts?
> But it is precisely the absence of philosophical reflection that has led to the invasion of the musical arena by half-baked ideas.
What half-baked ideas? For me, this also wants a [citation needed]. Has the musical arena been invaded by half-baked ideas? By what mechanism did philosophical reflection keep out those ideas in years past?
I could go on like this through the entire piece: I lack the training to understand it, and I suspect most people on HN do too.
Wagner (and most other composers) were highly influenced by their contemporary philosophy. The wikipedia article lists a lot of this and Wagner is a very good example for this as he had rather intense and highly influential conversations with philosophers: many books have been written about Wagner and Nietsche's relationship alone. Wagner also changed his ideas (and consequently his music) over time, most prominently embracing first germanic mythology and later christianity.
About the "competence" and "half-bakedness" of musical theories held by composers over the time you can probably entertain many prolonged spirited conversations. Personally - having read some classical and pre-classical aera musical theory books - I think you can find excellence and mediocracy distributed rather equally over the centuries.
And yes, this piece seems to expect the reader to know a bit about music history, especially that of musical theory.
To HN: what do you think Harman's object oriented ontology has to offer composers and performers of classical music? Or what about speculative realism? Or effective altruism?
Is there an objective scientific definition of the word "banal" as applied to music?
What I read is the author saying: "Other people like pop music, but I don't".
This crap is pedantic second rate "family values" conservatism disguised as a piece on music and philosophy.