Recently I’ve come across an intriguing article, by Samuel Arbesman in the Boston Globe, that introduces the notion of the “mesofact”—i.e., the fact that changes slowly, somewhere between (meso-) the two more common kinds of facts: the long-term and relatively unchanging (height of Mt. Everest) vs. short-term and volatile (today’s stock prices). Arbesman gives as an example the idea of relocating to Pittsburgh: not so long ago this wouldn’t have been advisable given Pittsburgh’s unsavory reputation for decay, but nowadays Pittsburgh offers a fast-growing job market and gobs of opportunity.
I’m such a hopeless music geek. The minute I read that article I started free-associating about musical institutions, ideas, composers, and the like that could be said to exist in the mesofactual realm. Slow change, but change nonetheless.
Serialism
A joke has been circulating for some time now, to the effect that Marxism is defunct everywhere but three places in the world: North Korea, Cuba, and Cambridge Massachusetts. There’s a sting to that phrase but also a kernel of truth: where else might one find utterly unreconstructed Marxists but in safely tenured academic positions? It seems to me that hardcore serialists are holding out only in such environments as well, if indeed there are any of the species still in existence.
All in all, serialism (and the 12-tonal system that preceded it) must be chalked up as a sodden failure. No amount of academic posturing, no number of learned tomes, no end to propagandistic tongue-lashings will change the inescapable fact that people, on the whole, just don’t like the stuff. More to the point is that composers don’t like it, either—at least not today’s young folks. I admit that my own viewpoint is a bit skewed, being a professor in a conservatory with a distinctly reactionary composition department. But that’s just the point: I do not teach in a bush-league school. My conservatory is one of the majors and is producing successful composers with dependable regularity. (At least insofar as ‘success’ can be determined for composers in today’s world.) And here we are—all these folks writing as their hearts and ears dictate, and not a gimlet-eyed pitch-grid calculator amongst them.
But not all that long ago we were being told that 12-tonal music and serialism were the language of the 20th century. A lot of people got sucked up in that particular vortex, including no less than Igor Stravinsky. (And despite his own idiosyncratic approach to 12-tonal writing, and despite his 12-tonal music remaining distinctly Stravinskian, very little if any of that music has displayed any shelf life, while the earlier stuff has taken its deserved place in the standard repertory.)
So I would say that the inevitability and the universality of 12-tonal/serialist music turns out to be a mesofact: what was once claimed to be universal has now been exposed as local, and ultimately short-lived.
Classicism
For I don’t know how long many of us were held thrall to a silly notion that Viennese Classicism was somehow Dresden-china-pretty music, dinky-dinky stuff that was well-structured in its own pretty, dippy way but really only a steppingstone to bigger things.
That bigger thing being Beethoven. Consider George Marek’s monograph on the composer, subtly titled Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music. What, precisely, was Beethoven freeing music from? Turns out that Marek meant Mozart and Haydn—those dinky-dinky boys.
The shibboleths ran deep. For example, I was told that Classical-era music tended to feature regular phrase lengths. Imagine my surprise when, as a grown-up musician, I discovered that irregular phrase lengths are quite common in Classical compositions.
I was admonished to exercise great caution in the tonal sphere; one musn’t play too loudly or too energetically. I began having trouble with that notion as soon as I learned that the era of Mozart & Haydn was also the era of Revolution. How could these dinky-dinky folk with their powdered wigs and lacy shirts be the same folk who utterly upended the old world order? It just didn’t gibe.
Nor did the notion of Beethoven as “freeing” music fare well once I began to realize that Haydn was still around and writing beautifully while Beethoven’s career was beginning to crest—or that if Mozart had lived a normal lifespan, his career might have overlapped Beethoven’s as well. I began realizing that Beethoven was a Classical composer, and any definition I had in my mind of Classicism must include Beethoven as well.
And yet the bulk of my musical education took place in the 1960s and 1970s—not very long ago. My teachers, however, were people whose ideas and opinions had been formed earlier, and the tradition of dinky-dink Classicism ran deep and long.
But it appears to be gone now, and good riddance. We understand the elegance and nuance of the era’s music, of course. But at the same time the strength, vibrancy, and just plain rowdiness of a lot of Mozart & Haydn has become part of the landscape as well. We know that Haydn liked the timpani to be loud, snappy, and virtuosic, and that he just loved lots of brass in his orchestra. (Apparently he also liked to take his symphonies at hair-raising tempi, at least as far as the London musicians of the 1790s were concerned.)
So Classicism as pretty and dinky-dink was mesofact; it has changed to a much broader and comprehensive understanding, one which allows the demonic right alongside the decorous.
Music as Progress
Underlying the notion of Haydn & Mozart acting like John the Baptist proclaiming the Coming of Beethoven was a somewhat more pernicious notion of music as progressing from more primitive to more advanced, from less to more, from worse to better. This one start dying out, I think, somewhere during the early 20th century as commentators couldn’t keep from noticing that audiences were slamming their auditory doors somewhere around 1900-ish or so.
The notion of music as progress is gone and I hope remains buried forever. Certainly there’s nothing better about 19th vs. 18th century music, nor are any of them noticeably better than Renaissance masters such as Josquin. Certain artistic media don’t suffer from the notion of progress at all: consider English drama. Heck, it practically sprung into existence at its peak with Shakespeare and seems to have been in a state of perpetual decline ever since. Visual arts? Modern painters have their advocates, but where are the Michelangelos, the Leonardos?
Western music seems to move more in large waves rather than a single line of progress. Great peaks—such as the enormous swell beginning in the late Baroque and continuing on through the early 19th century—seem to be followed by dips. The 17th century, although there was a lot of very fine music, is less part of our consciousness than the 18th, what with Bach and Handel and Mozart and Haydn and Vivaldi and Rameau and Scarlatti and the young Beethoven. And I would argue that much of the 20th century has been not so much a dip as a trough, nor are we out of the trough by any means. (And I’m not going to enter the issue of popular-vs-classical music—not near the end of a short blog posting.)
So music as progress was a mesofact that has given way to a notion of music as evolution, which is a different kettle of fish. After all, stuff doesn’t evolve in a straight line—it changes according to natural selection and all that, better to fit the environment and ultimately to reproduce more successfully. But that doesn’t make it better.