“My cat Gracie has thick gray fur and a cold wet nose.”
“Gracie fur My thick has cold and nose gray cat a wet.”
The first group is a standard sentence conveying information about a cat with thick gray hair named “Gracie” who belongs to me and has a cold wet nose. The individual words in the second set are the same as those in the first, but they have been deliberately reordered to create zero syntactical sense. Faced with these 12 words, any reader attempting to construe meaning will fail. Does “Gracie” refer to the words immediately following: “fur My”? If so, in what way? How to imagine “thick has cold and”? And what is a “cat a wet”? The reader may courageously try to parse out meaning from this jumble but will likely give up after gaining no more than a vague impression of fur and thickness and a cat who is wet and might have a cold. He will quickly move on in search of words that, when put together, convey more exact meaning.Imagine an entire school of English that demanded words be treated in the manner of the second, syntax-defying set, and you will have an idea of what happened to Classical music in the middle of the 20th century.
Labelled variously “12-tone music” or “dodecaphony” or “serialism,” the school of musical composition that dominated the two decades following World War II made it canonical procedure to arrange tones so as not to connect which each other except in the positive sense of simply be placed together, like the second set of words above. After 20 years of hearing new works that exemplified this (literal) nonsense, audiences gave up on the new altogether. Classical became a museum for the works that preceded 12-tone. In the first half of the 20th-century, the classical music repertoire was enriched by a plethora of great composers from Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky to Claude Debussy and Aaron Copland. The second half gave us a handful by comparison.
If the 21st century has produced any figures to compare with these, I don’t know of them. “New music” has for 30 years and more meant Madonna, Drake, Adele, Jay-Z, and so on.
Music as an Infinity of Hierarchies
Hierarchy is the concept of some things having importance relative to other things.
In music, hierarchy refers to certain tones in a given key having greater significance than others. Play a C chord on your guitar and you will hear three tones that enjoy a simple hierarchic relationship called the root (C), the third (E) and the fifth (G). Take away the fifth, the least necessary of the three, and you will still have the feeling of a C major chord. Take away the third as well, and you will have only the C, but the attuned ear will retain the sense of the chord that is implied. Why? Physics. A vibrating string vibrates in sections that in turn reflect the hierarchic relationships here outlined.
The history of Western music circa 1500 to 1950 was the story of an ever-increasing deepening and enrichment of the hierarchies implied in what became known as the overtone series. That root C in the C chord could also be the fifth of the root tone F, or the third of either an A minor chord or an A-flat major chord. In turn, the F could be a root tone or a fifth or third in some other key, etc. The hierarchic place of any given tone shifted from one key to the next; a single tone implied myriad possible connections.
There was not one pitch hierarchy, but a vast network of interlocking hierarchies, represented by the 24 major and minor keys of the tonal system. This network of interrelated keys allowed composers to explore an almost infinite number of hierarchic relationships between tones. From Bach and Mozart to Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler, it was never doubted that the overtone series was a physical reality with clear implications for pitched sound. The innovations that began with Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. pushed those implications into hitherto unthought-of territory, but no one denied that a single pitched sound contains within it a vast potential for hierarchic relationships to other tones.
12 Tones of Cacophony
By World War I, the complexity of tonal/hierarchic relationships had reached a peak. For one composer, a very able and often compelling composer, it was too much. Some new system must replace the old; a new system simpler to manipulate and without the endless ambiguities of pitch hierarchy. So, in 1923, exactly one century ago this year, Schoenberg proclaimed that composers must exchange the notion that one note implies, with physics-backed certainty, a hierarchy of others for a system that explicitly denies this truth.
He called it “Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another.” Schoenberg’s new system demanded that if a composer wrote, say, the tone C, he must not use it again until all the other 11 tones were used. Now, instead of C being the root of C major or the fifth of F, and so on, it was an isolated tone to be followed in no particular order by F#, Ab, B, Eb, A, E, C#, D, Bb, G, and F. The method was the deliberate sabotage of the hierarchy inherent in pitched sound, an outright denial of the physical fact that one tone contains within it the implications of various tonal hierarchies.
Tones—pitched sounds—were no longer to be experienced as parts of a melodic flow shaped by inherent, interlocking hierarchical relationships, but were to be considered isolated percepts only: individual tones connected only by proximity to each other.
A philosophy of radical doubt had pervaded Western thought from the 17th century on. Descartes codified it, but its assertions riddled the academy long before him. The 16th century, for example, enjoyed a huge surge in popularity of second-century Greco-Roman philosopher Sextus Empiricus, an extreme skeptic who essentially denied all knowledge (except, of course, the knowledge that all knowledge is invalid). In his tract, “Against the Musicians,” he even denied that there is any necessary connection between vibrations of air and sound itself. Yes, he wrote, there exist vibrations and there exist sounds, but how can you prove that one causes the other?
Descartes’s famous cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” was an attempt to stave off this increasingly popular skepticism, but by placing doubt at the base of his system, and the existence of a thinker as its first precept, Descartes set reeling centuries of philosophy-as-doubt. Truth was now something locked inside each individual, unconnected to the real entities outside that prison. Descartes once said that people walking down the street weren’t necessarily people, but might well be automatons posing as people. How could we know for certain?
All Experience Is Hierarchic
Schoenberg’s dismissal of the truth of the mutual hierarchies inherent in the experience of pitched sound was nothing other than the application of Sextus Empiricus/Descartes to music. The flattening of hierarchy is the triumph of skepticism. All perceptual experience is hierarchic. When we see, we see foreground and background. Even when we smell, our olfactory glands are busy arranging potential scents in a hierarchy appropriate to the thing smelled. And when we hear pitched sound, we naturally and inevitably arrange what we hear in a hierarchy.
When that hierarchy is denied, as it was deliberately denied in 12-tone music, the listener’s only true response is confusion and frustration, much as one is confused and frustrated by an encounter with schizophrenic activity. The analogy is not arbitrary or pejorative. A schizophrenic’s experience of reality is “a constant process of substitution of one isolated, static percept for the next,” according to British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his “The Matter With Things,” Vol. II. The experience of 12-tone is literally musical schizophrenia.
“Well,” you might respond, “so what? That was in the last century. We’ve moved on and music is now in another place.” Yes, but have you noticed the place it’s in? 12-tone music absolutely dominated the academy for two decades, poisoning the well of new music for generations to come. Audiences fled and the percentage of new pieces on classical programs declined. Where once living composers were well-known and their music listened to, today’s classical composers are unknown by the general population and barely any of their music enters the repertoire; it is played once and then forgotten.
Popular music was also a victim. For most of the 20th century, popular music drew from classical music, deriving its harmonic language and even many of its melodic gestures from the symphonies and concertos of the day. But after 20 years of 12-tone, all that ended, and in the 1960s popular music went in its own direction, a direction that has issued today in the chanting repetitions of hip-hop and the revolving chord loops of Adele and company. It is boredom with a beat.
The story of classical music’s attempt to eliminate hierarchy and the disastrous result that ensued is prelude to the present anti-hierarchical attacks on moral values and social conditions. All moral values are “the same,” and none better than (i.e. in a position of hierarchic superiority to) any other. All differences in social conditions must be levelled so as not to imply hierarchic differences between those who produce and those who do not. Men and women are interchangeable.
In the current cultural decay engendered by the attack on hierarchy, classical music was a trailblazer.
