I’m in the country this summer, reading, resting, and working on curriculum projects. One of these projects is sets of Composer Study lessons. The best part, so far, has been reading some great books about music and the appreciation of music, including Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons.
Here are a few gems:
“The old original sin was chiefly a sin of knowledge; the new original sin, if I may speak in these terms, is first and for most a sin of non-acknowledgement — a refusal to acknowledge the truth and the laws that proceed therefrom, laws that we have called fundamental.”
“For imagination is not only the mother of caprice but the servant and handmaiden of the creative will as well. The creator’s function is to sift the elements he receives from her, for human activity must impose limits on itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.”
“I have no use for theoretical freedom.”
I find these fascinating because they contradict a simplistic understanding of the “modern” period in art and cultural history as one of license and fragmentation, in which art governed by chance and lacking in limits was elevated above the art of order and natural law that supposedly existed before (in the Golden Age of Bach and Rembrandt who Believed in God).
In trying to remember where I got that simplistic understanding in the first place, I realized it probably originated from Francis Schaeffer and a system of teaching about art and culture that was born out of his book How Shall We Then Live?, published in 1976. I looked it up today, my country retreat handily having a copy. He doesn’t have much to say about Stravinsky (and no wonder, I suppose, because Stravinsky, though hugely influential in 20th-century music, does not strengthen his case), but he does have this to say about Schoenberg:
“Then came Schoenberg (1874-1951), and with him we are into the music which was a vehicle for modern thought. Schoenberg totally rejected the past tradition in music and invented the ’12-tone row.’ This was ‘modern’ in that there was perpetual variation with no resolution. This stands in sharp contrast to Bach who, on his biblical base, had much diversity but always resolution. Bach’s music had resolution because as a Christian he believed that there will be resolution both for each individual life and for history. As the music which came out of the biblical teaching of the Reformation was shaped by that world view, so the world view of modern man shapes modern music.”
Here, in contrast, is what Stravinsky has to say about Schoenberg’s music in Poetics of Music:
“Cacophony means bad sound, contraband merchandise, uncoordinated music that will not stand up under serious criticism. Whatever opinion one may hold about the music of Arnold Schoenberg (to take as an example a composer evolving along lines essentially different from mine, both aesthetically and technically), whose works have frequently given rise to violent reactions or ironic smiles — it is impossible for a self-respecting mind equipped with genuine musical culture not to feel that the composer of Pierrot Lunaire is fully aware of what he is doing and that he is not trying to deceive anyone. He adopted the musical system suited to his needs and, within that system, he is perfectly consistent with himself, perfectly coherent. One cannot dismiss music that he dislikes by labeling it cacophony.”
Schaeffer argues that Schoenberg turns his back on resolution, but Stravinsky argues that, within the perfectly rational system he uses, Schoenberg is coherent. What is resolution in music but meeting the expectations of a certain system of tonality? “Will they be met? Will they be met? Yes, here it is.” That’s what’s happening in our brains when we listen. A friend of mine who studied music composition once told me that, with training, the ear hears 12-tone music with the same dialogue of expectation and fulfillment that we naturally bring to our more common system of major/minor tonality.
It isn’t that 12-tone music is a system of constant variation but no resolution. It’s that resolution occurs under different circumstances within the 12-tone system. The tonality of Bach happens to be better-known and easier for us to hear, but Schoenberg’s system is no less ordered. It doesn’t deny an ordered universe.
Back to those interesting Stravinsky quotes at the beginning of the post, you would think that the “revolutionary” whose Rite of Spring caused an actual riot upon first hearing would support Schaeffer’s claims about fragmentation in 20th century music, but in Poetics of Music he sounds as orderly and unified as Schaeffer could wish. “Art is by essence constructive,” Stravinsky says, and “art is the contrary of chaos. It never gives itself up to chaos without immediately finding its living works, its very existence, threatened.”
I find Stravinsky’s words encouraging as I go about the large task of trying to help students hear order in music, to listen, within any given musical framework, for tension and release, for narrative, for drama, for idea, for dialogue. It is no less difficult with Mozart, which students can hear simply as “nice” or “boring,” than it is for Schoenberg and Stravinsky, which they might perceive as “ugly,” but it is a worthwhile endeavor for both.