Vi Hart on Stravinsky's Atonal Compositions [video]

So, I want to preface my comment by saying that I think this video is really well-made and entertaining, and that it's a decent attempt at making serialism accessible to a wider audience than it's traditionally had.

That said, it's littered with inaccuracies that I don't think we would tolerate if this were one of Vi Hart's math videos. Most egregiously, I think, is that she wrongly ascribes some of Schoenberg's dogma to Stravinsky: Stravinsky never had much to say about the desirability of conditioning children to understand dodecaphonic music intuitively (Schoenberg may not have either -- if I had my copy of Strunk's Source Readings in Music History on me right now I could verify this, but if I remember correctly it was either Webern or an unrelated third party who promulgated this particular vision of the ascendancy of avant garde music), nor was he particularly committed to using all twelve tones in his tone rows -- Agon, one of his most famous serialist works, employs a seventeen-tone row at one point [1]. Early on in the video, she selects a tone row at random and sort of dismissively asserts that no one would be able to tell the difference anyway. This is frustrating, because masters like Schoenberg did in fact order their rows to ensure not only structural but sonic coherence, using techniques such as hexachordal combinatoriality [2]. Now, that's not to say that these considerations are audible to most listeners -- one of serialism's greatest failings, in my opinion, is that much of its content is only discoverable on paper even by highly trained musicians -- but it's certainly audible to some, and it's worth noting that this runs counter to her assertion that musical lines don't have meaning until they're embedded in a harmonic context: it's not even true with serialism as practiced! It's certainly the case that many melodic lines can make sense in multiple harmonic contexts, but the idea that melodies imply their supporting harmony has been a foundational concept in Western music since at least the Baroque, and to counter otherwise is absurd -- otherwise we would be unable to comprehend the harmonic movements of e.g. a solo flute piece. This gets at my major frustration with this presentation, which is that to present serialism as merely a fun and basically arbitrary means of constraining your artistic output is deeply hostile to the reasons for why the technique was developed and the music that people made with it. Maybe you're rolling your eyes at this level of nitpickery, but the fact is that it's reasonable to expect someone who's posturing as an educator to have a better handle on the source material than I see here.

I've gotten flak from people for pointing out problems with her videos on music before, and I wonder if it's just because we don't have enough respect for music as a discipline to want to hear it when someone gets things wrong. For that reason I want to reiterate that this my criticism here isn't hostile, it's not meant as a takedown, but as someone with stakes in the material being presented I don't want to see it being presented inaccurately.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon_(ballet)#Music

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatoriality#Hexachordal_co...

Tangential:

Back when I was studying music, I took a class by the brilliant David Noon called "Stravinsky," on... Stravinsky. Dr. Noon presented a very early work of Stravinsky's (when he was in his early 20's, I believe) and noted that it was incredibly unpromising -- amateurish, banal. Note, 20 is really old by typical composer prodigy standards, so it's somewhat amazing that within a decade or so, Stravinsky went on to write masterpieces like The Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring.

Another fascinating thing about Stravinsky is that he re-invented himself several times, moving from his brilliant early Rimsy-Korsakoff like style to spare neo-classicism, and then on to atonality. As someone who's moved from music to software development, I find that inspiring.

I mostly mention this to encourage those who may have started down their paths in life atypically late.

Vi Hart is fantastic; I recommend watching all her videos [1] (though skip the very early music-only ones if that's not your thing). Particularly good are the hexaflexagon ones [2] and the plant spiral ones [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

For those of you who find Schoenberg's work interesting but ultimately unlistenable, I suggest checking out some Takemitsu. He uses a lot of similar ideas, but you don't get the same feeling of contempt for the concept of music that one sometimes gets listening to hardcore serialism. (I know that's not at all how schoenberg thought but it's hard to avoid feeling like that on occasion.)

Rain Tree Sketch is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD01g6q3zPo

Since this superb video mentions both Stravinsky and John Cage, I think it would be in order to bring up what the former said when the latter's "Silence" piece was described to him. There are many versions of the story; my favorite has Stravinsky replying something like "I look forward to hearing works of major length by this composer."

"Silence won't be in the public domain until 2062" - hah

This is the third time I've seen brainpickings.org: would it not have sufficed to link directly to the video?

I watched the whole video.

She has very pretty hands! To play all that atonal music with such facility, she is at least really good with piano. That she can sing that atonal music so well is astounding. And her drawing is amazing: The art she gets in her drawing, e.g., the little cup with legs, is surprisingly good; it looks like she could effortlessly be a famous cartoonist.

Beyond her talents and skills, her knowledge of music is amazing.

But, then, as far as I can tell about what she was intending to say about music, heavily I don't believe her. It appears to me that somewhere, at home, at Stony Brook, somewhere, she got a view of music that throws out the baby and drinks the bathwater. From what I can understand about what she is saying, I believe that she is missing most of what is really important in music. She seems to have some formality overwhelming reality.

It appeared that one of her main points was that music before atonality was somehow merely tonal and, thus, by 1900 or so played out, over with, and needed a new direction, e.g., atonality. I don't believe that.

For an analogy, from all I can tell, what she is saying is that everything that can be said in the English language has already been said so that, to say anything new, we need another language. Next, the content is not really in what is said anyway but just in what the reader reads into what is said. So, it's enough just to say random things. So, that we don't confuse with English, we will say the random things in a new, undefined language of gibberish no one has seen before.

Nonsense. We are not anywhere near the limits of what can be said in English. The bottleneck is having something to say, not the language to use to say it.

Well, there's a language in Western music. Here is a little of it: Pick two keys on a piano that are right next to each other; it may be that both keys are white or one is black and the other is white, but in any case they are next to each other. Then to a good approximation the fundamental frequency of the key on the right will be the twelfth root of 2 times the fundamental frequency of the key on the left. That frequency ratio is a semi-tone. A frequency ratio of the sixth root of 2, that is, two semi-tones, is a whole tone. If start on a note and go up tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, tone, tone, semi-tone, then have gone up in frequency by a factor of 2 (interval of an octave) and have played the notes of the major scale of the note you started on and ended on -- that note is called the tonic of that scale. You will be playing the notes of the major key of that tonic.

Of course for historical reasons, nearly all those frequency ratios are surprisingly well approximated by perfect tuning via ratios of small whole numbers. In particular, as at Google,

     2**(7/12) = 1.49830707688

which is close to 3/2 which is 7 semi-tones, called a perfect fifth, and how the main string instruments -- violin, viola, cello -- in an orchestra are tuned.

If you start on the note C and go up the major scale, then you will play on only the white keys and will be playing in the key of C major.

If you want to play some simple music, then pick a note as the tonic, start on that note, play the other notes in the major scale of that tonic but avoiding the tonic, but, when want to end, return to the tonic. That's done so often in Western music that everyone will quickly detect which note is the tonic (or one step more advanced, which notes are candidates for the tonic) and notice that when you return to the tonic the music has finished something and maybe just ended. All that is part of the language of Western music. And there's much more such language that we have all learned if only by association from lots of exposure.

But atonality largely discards that language. Then, someone who knows only English or is writing for people who know only English, discarding English essentially stops communications, and that's why it's super tough to hear any communication in atonal music. Yes, the music is new and different but so would be dropping a pile of brittle dishes on the floor, and in both cases the sound is new only because before everyone was smart enough to avoid making such a sound.

For music, yes, it mostly doesn't mean anything definite, specific, and unambiguous literally. Mostly. But, of course, in the Sibelius Finlandia or the R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben it is fairly unambiguous what is being said, including the machine gun fire in Finlandia and the personality of the girl in Ein Heldenleben.

For something still with meaning but more ambiguous, in the D major section of the Bach Chaconne for solo violin, there is a lot of use of repeated notes, especially A and D, three notes or four notes, and finally some repeated chords.

But what to make of the repetition? One approach is to regard them as insistent, increasingly so during the section, underlining the short passages between the repeated notes, passages that are similar but with some variation. It could be music from impassioned speaking, saying much the same thing over and over, more and more strongly, with the repeated notes/chords between as insistent emphasis.

At one point, the music suddenly changes, as if exhausted from the passion, and plays just some more consonant major thirds (D and F#, that is, an interval of two whole tones) with some short descending passages. Then the drama increases again with some repeated chords to the climax of the piece before a D minor section that starts with a confused catharsis.

So, for an interpretation, the music is from something intense going on, building up, becoming insistent, somehow trying to get some resolution one way or another, finally, with a big effort, doing so, and then receding to a catharsis.

One view is that the music is screaming out to the heavens about the intensity of the human spirit. Some might guess, but I don't see a good fit, is that the music was a representation of Bach working to add one more to his family. Either way, it's passionate music; the closest of anything else I know of is the Chaconne of Vitali, and it is quite different. No, I don't find Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps close.

There is an old story that composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco regarded the Bach Chaconne as the "greatest piece of music ever written". I can see many issues in interpretation in that music, but I see nothing that suggests that the level of art in the music was constrained by tonality.

Net, I don't see that tonal music, even the quite old version of it Bach used, either inhibited or exhausted new musical expression.

To understand better, we need to back up from just keys, tonality, chord progressions, etc. and notice that heavily music is art as in the classic definition the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. So, the listener gets a vicarious emotional experience or sometimes in particular something that speaks to part of their life, that is, confirms that others have faced the same things, or at least similar emotions, thus, confirming, possibly comfortingly, for the listener that they are not alone.

When Rostropovich first went to Berlin to play with von Karajan, for just what was meant in how Rostropovich started the second movement of the Dvorák concerto I don't know, but he, von Karajan, and several soloists in the orchestra seemed to have the same musical communications in mind, and that communication speaks effectively and directly to me about some parts of my life. So, Rostropovich achieved an effective communication in a universal language.

With this definition of art and with the essentially endless range of human experience, emotion, there is an endless range of music to communicate, interpret, new music, not written yet, including with tonality the same as used by any of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Puccini, ..., Wagner, J. Strauss, R. Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and more. Great, new music is no more limited by tonality than new information is limited by English; being atonal is no help for good, new art in music but, like replacing English with gibberish, a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

There is a lot of quite good art available mostly in just performance, with very old tonality; can get plenty of communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, awash in passion, pathos, poignancy, sympathy, empathy, identification, etc.

E.g., there is the Kelly Pickler I Wonder:

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9mvkxE5Ww

That with her hair, face, and figure, with the right hair stylist and dress selection, in places she is able to look a lot like Marilyn Monroe is nearly irrelevant. Instead, this music is a heart rending portrayal of a pretty, young woman, who still regards herself as a "little girl", suffering from feeling neglected by her mother. It's endearing. Standard emotional reactions include sympathy, empathy. Men, in particular, are supposed to feel protective, but some will see weakness and dependency and sense an opportunity for an easy score. And the music works, well. There is no end to such human experience, emotion to be interpreted, communicated.

That Kelly Pickler art really is new: Sure, the tonality is old, really old, and the harmony may be just a cliche; in tonality we're certainly not listening to Wagner's "Prelude" to Tristan und Isolde; still, I assure you from my many stacks of recorded music from vinyl to CDs and the Internet, from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff to the present, as art that Pickler video is new and at least good.

So, even recent popular music, with no pretensions at serious music, and using old tonalities and cliche harmonies, can still be good as art. Net, it's still quite possible, even in Nashville popular music, to do good art with old tonalities.

The main point is the art; tonality is not a limitation; and atonality is no help to better art.

Vi from Altitude? :P

So this website does what exactly? Summarizes things? I'm discarding it as blog spam. Link the actual video not an article with a loose description begging for page views based on somebody elses content, and then they ask you to donate at the bottom of the page.