True artists are not the antagonists of tradition but its latest advocates. They belong to the future because they are guardians of the past.
In the past, our musical culture had secure foundations in the church, in the concert hall, and in the home. The common practice of tonal harmony united composers, performers, and listeners in a shared language, and people played instruments at home with an intimate sense of belonging to the music that they made, just as the music belonged to them. The repertoire was neither controversial nor especially challenging, and music took its place in the ceremonies and celebrations of ordinary life alongside the rituals of everyday religion and the forms of good manners.
We no longer live in that world. Few people play instruments and music at home emerges from digital machines, controlled by buttons that require no musical culture to be pressed. For many people, the young especially, music is a form of solitary enjoyment, to be absorbed without judgment and stored without effort in the brain. The circumstances of music-making have therefore changed radically, and this is reflected not only in the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music, but also in the radical avoidance of melody and harmony in the “modern classical” repertoire. Released from its old institutional and social foundations, our music has either floated into the modernist stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth by the repetitious mechanisms of pop.
At the serious end of the repertoire, therefore, ideas have taken over. It is not music that we hear in the world of Stockhausen but philosophy—second-rate philosophy to be sure, but philosophy all the same. And the same is true of other art forms that are cut loose from their cultural and religious foundations. The architecture of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe is an architecture of ideas, and when the futility of the ideas became apparent they were replaced by other ideas, equally alien to architecture as an aesthetic discipline, but nevertheless impeccably philosophical. The gadget architecture of Zaha Hadid and Morphosis does not issue from a trained visual imagination, or a real love of composition: it issues from doodles on a computer in response to ideas. There is a philosophy behind this stuff, and if ordinary people protest that it doesn’t look right, that it doesn’t fit in, or that it is offensive to all natural standards of visual harmony, they will be answered with fragments of that philosophy, in which abstract concepts extinguish the demands of visual taste. These buildings, they will be told, provide a pioneering use of space, are breaking new ground in built form, are an exciting challenge to orthodoxies, resonate with modern life. But just why those properties are virtues, and just how they make themselves known in the result, are questions that receive no answer.
Just the same kind of botched philosophy has dominated the modern classical repertoire. 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. But it is precisely the absence of philosophical reflection that has led to the invasion of the musical arena by half-baked ideas. Without the firm foundations provided by a live culture of music-making, philosophy is the only guide that we have; and when good philosophy is absent, bad philosophy steps in to the gap.
The worst example of this, and it is an example whose influence is almost as strong today as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, is Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, first published in 1947. In that book Adorno develops the philosophy of a major composer, who almost succeeded in doing what Wagner happily failed to do, which was to replace the reality of music by an abstract idea of it. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism was based on a set of ideas that are clearly disputable, but which, because of the pretense of system, could overwhelm the hesitant objections of mere music-lovers. Here are some of those ideas:
- the diatonic scale arranges pitches which could be arranged in other ways and still be used to make intelligible and enjoyable music;
- melodies could be constructed without the use of scales, and without a mode or a key;
- the twelve notes of the chromatic scale could be used in such a way that no one of them emerges as tonic, or as in any other way privileged;
- to achieve this it is sufficient to devise a permutational, rather than a successive, arrangement of the pitches;
- harmonies, construed as simultaneities, will abolish the distinction between consonance and dissonance, opening the way to new forms of harmonic sequence.
All those assumptions involve an arbitrary intrusion of abstract thought into a realm of empirical knowledge, thereby upsetting wisdom that had been slowly acquired over centuries, and which was not in any sense the product of a single brain. The fact that there is no evidence for them counts for nothing, since they are philosophical, part of an a priori attempt to found an alternative to the existing music. For Adorno, they promised the renewal of music, the break with a tradition that had become banal and cliché-ridden, and the hope of a fresh start in the face of cultural decline. Those thoughts were wound into a philosophy that combined Frankfurt-school Marxism, the denunciation of popular culture, and a high-brow adulation of all that was recondite, unpredictable, and difficult to follow. Adorno had the gift—the very same gift that Schoenberg had—of masking his idiosyncratic views as necessary truths and clothing unsubstantiated speculations in the garments of priestly authority. He was the advocate of an intimidating orthodoxy. And yet the actual arguments, both in Adorno’s book and in Schoenberg’s original articles, are self-serving rhetoric, which assume what they set out to prove.
Philosophy can be driven out only by more philosophy. And the rival philosophy has not been forthcoming. All that we have received from Darmstadt and its successors is a reiteration of the clichés introduced by Adorno, in particular the cliché that musical organization in our tradition is fundamentally arbitrary, and can be remade according to other rules—permutational, aleatoric, serial, and so on—while engaging the perceptions and interests that have emerged over centuries in the concert hall. That cliché commits the paradigm error of philosophy, which is to oppose an empirical truth with an a priori falsehood.
There is in fact nothing arbitrary about the diatonic scale or the place of the tonic within it. While there can be other scales, some sounding strange to Western ears, they are all attempts to divide up the octave, to provide significant points of rest and closure, and to preserve natural harmonies delivered by the overtone series. The diatonic scale is one of a number of modes derived from mediaeval church music—and its history is not a history of arbitrary invention, but one of gradual discovery. The circle of fifths, the chromatic scale, modulation, voice-leading, and triadic harmony—all these are discoveries, representing at each stage an advance into a shared tonal space. The result is not the product of decision or design: It is as natural and embedded in our experience as the post and beam in architecture, or frying and baking in cookery. If composers are to ‘make it new,’ then they must recognize this natural quality and not defy it. Yet defiance of nature has become an orthodoxy, and, when asked to explain and justify this defiance, composers will invariably lean on some variant of Adorno’s philosophy. Music for the concert hall has increasingly followed the pattern of Stockhausen’s Gruppen—elaborate sound effects, organized by arcane systems of rhythm and pitch, which no normal ear can hold together as music, but which comes with intimidating programme notes explaining why this doesn’t matter, and why the normal ear is an impediment to creative music in any case.
What I have said of Stockhausen’s massively pretentious piece will be dismissed as reactionary and philistine. Adorno and his followers accuse their opponents of “not getting it,” of being behind the times, and of resisting the march of history. A kind of anti-bourgeois snobbery infects Adorno’s pages, as it infected the pages of his hero, Karl Marx. The Young Hegelian doctrine of the forward march of history survives in their philosophy of music, notwithstanding its crushing refutation by history itself. One of Wagner’s greatest achievements was to have taken that Young Hegelian doctrine seriously, to have built it into a music drama of titanic proportions, and to have allowed his music to refute it. In the end, that is one of the most important lessons of the Ring cycle. The artist-hero, who is to usher in the new world of emancipation by smashing the spear of our previous agreements, thereby destroys the moral order on which he depends. Such is Siegfried’s tragedy.
No wonder Adorno was so negative about Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung, the most modern composition of its time, which shows in detail why it is against nature to be a modernist. We need to go back over the ground so intricately covered by that great work of art, and to raise again the question that motivates it: How to reconcile future creativity with the legacy of our past agreements? This question has been raised by other composers too—notably by Hans Pfitzner in Palestrina. And that opera contains the seeds of quite another philosophy than the one foisted on the musical public by Adorno, the philosophy touched on also by T.S. Eliot in his great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” According to this rival philosophy, true artists are not the antagonists of tradition but its latest advocates. They belong to the future because they are guardians of the past.
Republished with gracious permission from the Future Symphony Institute.
This essay was first published here in February 2016, and appears here again in memory of the great Sir Roger Scruton (born February 27, 1944), who died on January 12, 2020.
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Editor’s note: The featured image is “Emma at the Piano” (1914), by George Bellows, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been enhanced for clarity.
Good art is never arbitrary. Its form, if it is to be effective, must be rooted in human physiology. Hence the iambic pentameter line of poetry is related to the breath and the heart beat. Thank God for the sanity of a Roger Scruton. He will be deeply missed.
Yes, poor old Roger Scruton. I have a sense that his postumous reputation and influence will grow. He may even become the twentieth century Burke.
That sentence about Adorno’s schoolboy error of logic in assuming the very premises he is attempting to prove is so typically deft. Something Scruton omits to mention is that in the case of post war German music there was the imperative to repudiate every trace of the country’s cultural heritage appropriated by the Nazis. Something George Steiner writes about in his essay The Pythagorean Genre.
Play it again, Sam.
1. The real audience for symphonic money today comes from composing for video games, and videos. Extremely competitive, and listenable.
2. The presence of ten gazillion pop bands means that for most folks, rock music and R&B form their playing and local listening.
3. Best recent opera – “Jerry Springer – the Opera”
4. interesting how good Chinese, Korean, Japanese musicians are, and how rare their composers are???
Western tradition often predates written sources. Pythagoras was among the seven pre-Socratic philosophers whose writings have become lost. The western musical scale was known to him. The musical scale is not arbitrary. It can be constructed in the following way, attributed to him. The intervals symbolize arithmetical ratios of lengths of strings or of pipes. The modern acousticist speaks of frequencies.
The octave: Start with the interval 2:1. The quint and the quart: Subdivide the interval 2:1 in intervals 3:2 (quint) and 4:3 (quart). Three tertses and a minor second: Subdivide the interval 3:2 in intervals 5:4 and 6:5. Subdivide the interval 4:3 in intervals 5:4 and 16:15. Here 5:4 is a major terts, and 6:5 is a minor terts. And 5:4 is a major terts, and 16:15 is a minor second. The seven-intervals scale (C-major scale): Subdivide the interval 5:4 in 9:8 (major second) and 10:9 (major second). Subdivide the interval 6:5 in 9:8 (major second) and 16:15 (minor second). Subdivide the interval 5:4 in 9:8 (major second) and 10:9 (major second). Do not subdivide the interval 16:15 (minor second). There are five major and two minor seconds.
I am sorry! I made a mistake. The scale I gave above is actually an F-scale, not a C-scale. Such mistakes point to the risk in the modern attempt to reduce tradition to calculation. The minor terts (6:5) must be subdived as 16:15 and 9:8, in this order. The C-major scale consists of the intervals: major second, major second, minor second, major second, major second, major second, minor second. On the modern piano, these are all “white key” seconds. The major seconds have a “black key” between them, while the minor seconds do not have a “black key” between them. It is possible to have a quint that equals a quart: for the Devil’s quint, minor second, major second, major second, minor second, respectively, for the Devil’s quart major second, major second, major second.
Robert. I really welcome your comments referring to what i would want to call the Just Scale. (I’m afraid that I would challenge your statement that ” The western musical scale was known to [Pythagoras]”. At that time the only way to measure relationships between notes was by LENGTH. The basic ancient Greek scale was a descending scale which is not our major scale.
But the key issue that needs to be looked at here is the musical cul-de-sac that I feel we blunder into when we speak of the black notes on the keyboard. It seems to me that the bad philosophy arose when we arrived at “equal temperament” which is a numerical compromise enabling a particular development of the just scale to take place.. O.K. it is a compromise that led to valid things but when it becomes our philosophy it leads us to a dead end, which, to my ear, is the twelve-tone scale. There is no philosophical justification for framing music on the twelfth root of 2. We need to re-examine our musical roots and then something new might emerge. But we need to be very careful not to be blinded by features of the false philosophy in which we are so enmeshed.
Thank God for Mr. Scruton! Once knowledge has become lost from living memory, it is painful to reinvent it. Present civilization can probably not afford the pain. The correct order to construct the seven-intervals musical scale, according to harmonies, is probably:
2:1
4:3 (quart) 3:2 (quint)
10:9 9:8 16:15 9:8 10:9 9:8 16:15 (seconds)
Only with this order can the seconds be combined to:
5:4 6:5 6:5 5:4 5:4 6:5 and cyclic 32:27 (tertses)
As a composer going into the third decade of the 21st century, I see the previous century as a Musical Phoenix that crashed and burned. And now we rise from the ashes with that entire cycle as our shared past, as our tradition. There are aspects of 20th music that are the equivalent of some of Hieronymus Bosch’s works. There is a kind of well designed ugliness to it, a kind of Anti-Beauty. It has its place but who wants to actually hang out there for any length of time? Since all well designed Western Art Music contains elements of tension and release, many composers have spent 100 years seeing just how tense we can get. Now our palette has many colors with which to paint our sounds.