Professional Documents
Culture Documents
AESTHETIC VALUE
WALTER HORN
n a remarkably audacious article1at least for something found in a
buttoned down academic philosophy journalDiana Raffman, a
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, boldly states that
atonal music is and must always remain, not only artistically defective,
but a con game. I claim, she writes, that in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot intend to communicate pitch-related
musical meaning by writing twelve-tone music. . . . To that extent,
twelve-tone music is fraudulent, and so not art. 2 Her position may be
familiar to the readers of Perspectives of New Music, since it is largely
based upon certain results of empirical psychology compiled and theorized about by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff 3 that have received
some attention in these pages.4 The main support for Raffmans argument is provided by two empirical premises. They are:
I
As we want to know what connections exist between a certain subspecies of musical form or structure and aesthetic value, it will be
necessary for us to explain our key terms: music, local structure, and
aesthetic value. All three of these are controversial, and numerous
books in aesthetics and music theory have been largely devoted to their
explication. Fortunately, however, it is less important that we get full
agreement on each definition or general explanation here than that we
ensure that we are both clear in what we mean and that we leave
Raffmans main thesis open to discussion. By the latter, I mean that we
must be careful not to assume either what she wants to demonstrate or
its contrary. For example, if we define music in such a way that only
those items that are in the key of G may be correctly called music at
all, then there will be no question of interest regarding what makes
Mozarts Symphony in G more aesthetically valuable than Vermeulens
Symphony No. 4, because based on that definition, the Vermeulen piece
isnt music at all. It may well be that there is some batch of properties
which is such that something is a piece of music if and only if it exemplifies each (or enough) of the properties in the batch, but, if so, that
cluster cannot be used to distinguish some specimens of music from
others as one might use being in the key of G to distinguish the
Mozart from the Vermeulen in ordinary English.6
define them)13 and those who have argued that values arent properties
at all,14 let us abandon any hope of definition entirely here, and settle
for the lesser aim of simply trying to make clear how we shall use the
phrase. In a review of Eddie Prvosts Minute Particulars, I made the
following remarks:
Music (or any art or technology) may be evaluated from a number
of standpoints. Consider a pair of sneakers. . . . We may wonder of
these items: Will they hold up? Are they comfortable? Are they
cheap? Were children exploited in their production? Etc. Each of
these questions may be quite important to us, but each is also
clearly distinguishable from all the others. . . . If, at the end of the
day, Prvost concludes that the determination should be made
that sneakers are good if and only if they get at least a B- on all,
say, fifteen criteria, I will have no quarrel with the basic operative
theory, though I may, of course, disagree with his conclusions.
What must not be forgotten, however, is that we can also focus on
just one of these fifteen criteria (e.g., Are they nice looking?)
and consider it alone, in isolation from all the others. . . . I, with
all my history, linguistic limitations, background, education, conceptual scheme, economic precursors, etc., have a concept of what
I call beauty (which has been molded, of course, by all that history), and I am capable of ascribing it or withholding it to this or
that piece of music (with all its own various and sundry history).15
It doesnt matter either that the sneakers were produced by such
and such culture or that I was. Though both of those claims are
certainly true, neither one prevents me from pondering this aesthetic question in isolation from all the other considerations, and,
what's more, I very often do.16
It is clear that no attempt is there made to define aesthetic value
its my view that the concept cannot be broken down into constituent
parts, so that only the pointless production of near synonyms could be
managed if a definition were attempted. Instead, I took the Moorean
approach that all one needs is a gentle reminder that, whatever aesthetic excellence may be, it is certainly not this and not that.17
Fortunately, as indicated, we have no need either to define
aesthetic excellence or to tackle questions about its objectivity. For
our purposes we need only be comfortable that we have a pretty good
idea of what is meant by the expression. When we consider our preanalytic understanding of the phrase, it becomes clear that, although
we may not know whether its assignment is objective or subjective, we
II
As we have already seen from Raffmans remark about punctuation and
story lines, much of the support for the proposition that where there is
no local structure (as defined above) there can be no aesthetic value
stems from analogies claimed to exist between music and a natural
language like Chinese. Remember Raffmans indictment: If twelve-tone
music cannot carry the pitch-related meaning it purports to carry, then
it cannot be a vehicle for the communication of such meaning. Therefore I claim, in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot
intend to communicate pitch-related musical meaning by writing twelvetone music.24 To make sense, Raffmans charge requires the premise
that music, like spoken languages, is capable of semantic content. If so,
and only well-formed musical phrases are semantically competent to
refer, perhaps one need only show that atonal music is not wellformed to conclude that it lacks an ingredient that is necessary for
aesthetic value. Stanley Cavell has made similar claims, although he has
utilized the above-criticized plan of using the term music in such a
way that, if some array of sounds lacks what he takes to be sufficient
meaning, it cant be music at all. He argues that such similarities to a
work of Bach or Berlioz as being played by violinists or requiring
training of a certain kind to perform does not suffice to prevent a
befuddled listener to a Xenakis orchestral work from sensibly asking,
But is it music?25
Alan H. Goldman seems to concur with something like the
meaning attribution and its relation to syntactic structure, at least to
the extent that he takes understanding of the musical form of a work
to be necessary to a certain higher level of enjoyment.26 He grants that
one can get some sort of (I take it quite limited) emotional response
without this understanding, but, on his view, higher aesthetic pleasure can come only where there is a deeper sort of grasp. And, on his
view, inability to understand local musical structure, something which
we have here agreed to assume follows of physical necessity from
atonality, yields the very opposite of pleasure.
When one fails to understand a piece of music, when one is at sea
at a performance of an atonal piece, for instance, it is because one
cannot follow and anticipate its course. One has no sense of being
directed toward musical goals, of synthesizing sections into intelligible sequences in the process of hearing. If lack of understanding
manifests itself in feeling this inability to follow, remember, and
anticipate, then understanding consists in being able to do so. . . .
Aesthetic failure in a piece is failure to engage listeners in the way
10
11
12
13
14
III
Where does this leave Raffmans thesis regarding the defectiveness of
all serial works? If we cannot trust linguistic analogies to help demonstrate defects in atonal music, can we, perhaps, follow Schenker in
looking for a type of musical form having no semantic pretensions to
provide the criteria we can use? Are there more exclusively musical formulae that will provide us with an infallible guide to the level of a
works aesthetic value?
Richard Taruskin, who has long made bales of hay from (at least the
title of) Babbitts Who Cares if You Listen?35 has derided any such
hope as requiring the commission of what he has dubbed the poietic
fallacy. He makes it a quest that is at least as foolish as Rev.
Casaubons absurd hunt for The Key to all Mythologies in Eliots
Middlemarch. Taruskin writes,
The beauty of a twelve-tone row, from the poietic standpoint, was
that by furnishing a sort of quarry from which all the musical
events in a compositionmelodic, harmonic, contrapuntal, texturalwould be hewn, it served as a sort of automatic Grundgestalt,
absolutely ensuring the sort of demonstrable organic unity on
which Goetheanthat is, Schoenbergiannotions of artistic quality depended.36
15
I think Taruskin is completely correct to be suspicious about qualityproviding formulae. But there is nothing new or exclusively dodecaphonic about the hunt for secret algorithms that can engender musical
masterworks. At least since the seventeenth century (and perhaps since
Pythagoras) there have been those who have believed that one can
unfailingly produce aesthetically valuable music by ensuring that it
instantiates a particular structure. H. H. Stuckenschmidt has noted that
The dream that man might be a dispensable factor in the creation
of music is not as new as might be thought. The scholars of the
Baroque era keenly indulged in similar games and speculations.
One of the cleverest of them, the Jesuit and natural philosopher
Athanasius Kircher, gave an outline in his Musurgia Universalis
(1622) of an apparatus called the Arca Musarithmica which could
turn out compositions by a mathematical process.37
Furthermore, as Taruskin himself has pointed out in an illuminating
portrait of John Cage,38 it is not really formality that is the culprit
here, anyhow. Non-formal techniques, even aleatoric ones, have also
been thought to guarantee artistic quality.39
I completely agree that the search for transcendent methods of
construction that will provide aesthetic excellence is fools errand.40 As
indicated above, knowledge of formal structure, method of composition, performance technique, or the geographical or historical location
of a style can do no more than enhance or detract from otherwise
obtained appreciation of a work. Such information cannot provide
quality on its own. And it is clear that musicians on both sides of the
atonality divide have failed to see this. It has not only been such
Taruskin punching bags as Babbitt, Cage, Schoenberg, Sessions, and
Wuorinen who have sometimes revealed their confusion on this matter.
Those who believe that either Schenkerian structural coherence or the
appropriate inspiration in composition or performance is either
necessary to or sufficient for the production of artistic quality commit
the same fallacy.
Indeed, this error has been committed by backers of spontaneous
composition, too. For example, in the book by improvising percussionist Eddie Prvost referred to above, the amount of aesthetic value of a
work is taken to vary directly with the level of communitarianism in
that works creation as well as the ability of a performance of the piece
to foster local collectivism in society at large.41 Another performer/theoretician, David Borgo, has associated musical value with, of all things,
fractals. As I noted about Borgos book on this subject elsewhere:
16
How can the fact (if it is one) that an Evan Parker solo more
closely resembles a Cape Cod coastline, a hive of bees, or a Jackson
Pollack painting than does a Bach or Ellington cantata, provide
Parkers music with any additional creds? Maybe the sole of my
shoe is also more similar than the Bach to the coastline or the hive:
what can that possibly prove about the artistic merits of my footwear?42 For Borgo . . . it is simply taken as axiomatic that (i) being
analogous to something like near chaos or swarming behavior;
or (ii) explicitly referring to any such natural processes; or even
(iii) being a reproduction of somesay, a recording of brainwaves, frog chants, or plant behaviorwill necessarily garner for
any musicking the much sought-after property of emergence.43
To repeat, I agree with Taruskin that such theorizing is a symptom
of the poietic fallacy and, thus, largely tosh.44 I insist, however, that
this inability of an inner structure to make a work of music beautiful is
as true of tonal works as it is of alea or dodecaphony. In the end, the
level of a musical works aesthetic value must stand, first and foremost,
on its aural make-up and powers; examinations of form, genesis, or
compatibility with theories of generative grammar will give us little
guidance. Are we then stuck? Are there no tests at all that we can rely
on to determine musical value? Matters are not quite as dire as that in
my opinion.
It is important to remember here that at least some of those who
claim that atonal music is no good have long had what they take to be
a more obvious reason for this accusation than any arguments
regarding either the local-comprehensibility of (for example) twelvetone works or their paucity of any other type of magical structure or
compositional technique. Moreover, this reason doesnt depend on any
analogies between musical and semantical properties. It is simply that
audiences dont like twelve-tone music.
I take this accusation very seriously and agree with Taruskin that it
would be a mistake to dismiss it based on some allegedly overweening
structural arrangement or alchemical genesis of a piece. In my view, all
those who agree that it is the reaction to the sounds that matters most
should concede that at least some support may be derived for any claim
that serial construction results in bad music from solid evidence that
nobody likes dodecaphonic pieces. I do not mean to suggest that any
such evidence would be dispositive. Tastes change, and, assuming for
the moment that aesthetic values are not entirely a matter of culture,
even large majorities can be wrong. Nevertheless, I take the claim that
extremely few of those who have heard atonal music have liked it to
17
during Dvork),
but, of course, Slonimskys Lexicon46 makes clear that
whatever is new has been derided as noise/garbage at least since
Beethovens time. I have sought to find quantity-of-performance data
on the web and did discover one site47 according to which Schoenberg
ranked 64th among classical composers in 2013 performances. (Britten
who wrote at least one twelve-tone piece himselfplaced fourth in
the world and first in the U.K., presumably because of his centenary.)
But as there was no information regarding which countries or concert
halls were surveyed, how many people attended, etc., this information
barely seems worth repeating out loud. Several things do seem clear,
however. While it is doubtful that many works of strict serialism are
being created anymore, due presumably as much to the difficulty in
writing such pieces as to any claimed aesthetic defects, non-dodecaphonic, completely atonal music can now be heard nearly everywhere.
At least since Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced Ligeti to
the movie-going public way back in 1968, both film and television
soundtracks have been rife with both noise and atonal classical
segments.48 If these soundtracks have been considered unpleasant or
18
19
IV
To be fair, as noted above, Taruskin does not endorse Raffmans claim
that no twelve-tone works are any good. He takes the more moderate
position that, if any of them are aesthetically pleasing, this is in spite of,
rather than because of, their serialism. He writes,
Both Schoenberg and Webern, in their different ways, compensated for the nonhierarchical organization of pitch relations by
building ad hoc hierarchies into their products in the form of significantly recurring chords, rhythmic patterns, or melodic shapes,
or by emphasizing symmetries whether melodic (in the form of
pitch palindromes, especially in Webern) or harmonic (chords that
have the same intervallic structure when inverted). But why
should one have to compensate in this way? If Schoenberg and
Webern achieved beauty and communicativeness in spite of their
methods rather than because of them, the methods might possibly
be worth a critical look.54
Furthermore, Taruskin takes Schoenbergs doctrine of the emancipation of dissonance to be entirely inconsistent with his use of
traditional forms. For example, the elaborate fugue-making in Pierrots
Der Mondfleck, is foolish on his view, since the whole essence of
counterpoint has always been dissonance treatment.55 If dissonance
is emancipated, one superposition of several lines would seem to be as
good as any other, so the whole process must be self-destructive.
What Taruskin seems to miss here is that any complaint of this type,
whether it concerns fugue-construction, twelve-tone technique,
aleatoric artifice, or improvisational caprice, is nothing but the
commission of another version of the very poietic fallacy that he has
derided. We must judge music on its effects on listeners first and
foremost. The recognition that it contains a fugue or was derived from
a star chart may enhanceor, I suppose, detract fromour enjoyment,
but any direct focus on construction method as the fons et origo of
20
21
If all this is so, why has there been so much concern about any
compositional method that seems somehow artificial? Why does
there seem to be something suspicious about Schoenbergs prescriptions, the use of computers, the hunt for fractals, and the tossing of
sticks? It is my view that this attitude comes from the fear of being
defrauded. Raffman warns us that with atonal music the performers
may well be engaged in empty musical mugging 58 when they seem
to be expressing themselves or the music. We can almost hear her
whisper, Dont be taken in! Cavell notes that this fear is far from
new. He tells us that Tolstoy, a man who hunted deeply and
persistently for marks of sincerity, concluded that all of the following
gentlemen were heavily involved in the big con: Beethoven, Brahms,
Wagner, Michelangelo, Renoir; the Greek dramatists, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Ibsen.59 No doubt there are perils on
either side of But the emperor is naked! debate.60 But Cavell
maintains that we must ignore the dangers and take a stand on one
side or the other. If we know that even a child might have made
some celebrated drip painting, field recording, or drone piece; if a
computer could make a twelve-tone work within minutes with the help
of random number generation, Cavell tells us that we must ask How
is this to be seen? What is the [artist] doing? The problem, in
Cavells words, is not one of escaping inspiration, but of determining
how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or
satisfactory, how he can mean this.61 For Cavell, it is only by
answering such questions that we can determine whether something
deserves the name of art.
But isnt all of this worry about being deceived by tricksters just
another artifact of the poietic fallacy? Instead of asking questions about
how something was built, whether it fosters communitarianism, or
what was intended to be conveyed by its creator, couldnt we learn to
trust our own aesthetic responses instead and consider all that other
stuffhowever interestingjust (tasty, tasteless, or over-salted) gravy?
Why must those at the premiere of Rite of Spring who were moved to
rock out compulsively be embarrassed if it later turns out that the piece
was made by a computer or a seven-year old child? And why should
anyone believe that they have discovered that the piece was better than
previously thought if it turns out that theres a perfect double fugue in
there somewhere (and swell with pride if they noticed this feature all
by themselves)? Again, I dont suggest that all of these other matters
are or should be entirely extraneous to our appreciation, that
consideration of them cannot enhance or detract from our aesthetic
experiences. I simply insist that they must be seen as secondary: they
22
cant make a bad piece good, or a good piece bad. Whether or not
particular facts about the origin of a work obtain and have had their
effects on the resultant music, the aesthetic value of an artwork is not,
strictly, a function of the intention to utilize or abstain from a particular compositional technique. The goodness or badness of a piece is
neither because of nor in spite of such intensions, except, of course, to
the extent that their implementation (whether correct or incorrect)
happens to make the music-as-heard better or worse.
Cavell tells us that Tolstoy and Nietzsche agreed on many of the
signs of fraudulence: a debased Naturalisms heaping up of random
realistic detail, and a debased Romanticisms substitution of the
stimulation and exacerbation of feeling in place of its artistic control
and release; and in both, the constant search for effects. Wariness of
such elements has continued.62 The use of birdsong, from Beethoven
to Delius and from Messiaen to the maker of a field recording, seems
to be a case of ever-increasing realistic detail. But any decrease in
what might be called symbolic distance in recent music is not found
only in the portrayal of natures apparent indifference to human
artifice. Where once a viol and shawm were used to depict the pain of a
mourning parent, now a recording of an intensely keening mother may
be heard floating above a string quartet in an attempt to intensify our
empathy with human sufferers. Whether or not the birds were easy to
tape or the recording of the mother constitutes her exploitation, must
either represent a debasement of the music itself? If so, it must also
have been debasement when Ives depicted the sound of separate
marching bands crossing paths on a road, not by allusion, but by
simply having two pieces in different keys and time signatures played
simultaneously, or when Biber required the insertion of paper into
violin strings to imitate drumming. If sights or sounds of nature are
among the most beautiful, inspiring, or saddest things we encounter in
our lives, why would we expect composers not to continue to mimic
them in ever-new ways? And if the results continue to bring something
of the non-composedindeed entirely non-artificialworld back to us
as we listen, well . . . thats a good thing, right? Surely we ought not to
ignore our feelings of appreciation for what Hall identified as
(approximately) the appropriateness of the aesthetic surface to the capture
of our object emotions because we disapprove of the composers means
or theories. Indeed, wont increasing our focus upon the difficulty or
ease of creation or other compositional matters end up by making our
emotional responses largely irrelevant? In fact, if difficulty of construction or intent to defraud are crucial to the determination of artistic
value, it seems we should be hiring investigators, taking depositions, or
23
V
Let us consider where we have arrived. We started with an argument as
to the necessary worthlessness and trickery of twelve-tone music
(which were claimed to likely apply to other atonal music as well).
Ignoring some of the niceties included above, this argument can be
briefly put as follows:
1. Tone rows in serial music cannot be recognized when heard even
by trained listeners.
2. Only such music as contains forms that can be recognized when
heard by trained listeners has aesthetic value.
3. Therefore, serial music has no aesthetic value.
We have agreed to assume the truth of (1). There is no reason whatever to believe (2), however, which seems to require either commission
of the poietic fallacy or an apparently false empirical claim about what
no listeners enjoy (or both). Turning to (3), it would not follow from
(1) and (2) even if both were true, because pieces that are serial in
their construction might contain recognizable features other than tone
rows that are nevertheless a function of the choice of those rows and
their manner of presentation. We have seen that proponents of the
argument might respond that the dodecaphonic structure itself adds
no value to pieces containing it, based on the theory that what itself
cannot be recognized can only accidentally contribute to anything that
can be recognized. We can try to help such proponents with their
attempt to rehabilitate the above syllogism by altering (3) as follows:
3*. Therefore, the serial construction of a piece adds nothing to the
aesthetic value of that pieceexcept by accident.
24
25
with them. In fact, that very frustration was the main impetus for this
paper. How much does it matter if a canon in Roussels Third or
Shostakovichs Fourth is constructed as Fux or Schenker would have
liked or if these later composers actually cheated a bit here and there?
Are musical creations necessarily better if they dont stray from
accepted forms at any point? Or, restricting ourselves to Raffmans
local structures, why should it be thought that the absence of a home
key must still produce endless discomfort in every listener in the 21st
Century? Even if we concede that a V-I cadence is naturally tension
reducing, cant people have later come (perhaps through weariness of
hundreds of years use of this natural phenomenon) to instead find
themselves calmed first by Ivess Unanswered Question, a written out
Tournemire organ improvisation, or Weberns pointillism (and still
later find comfort in the icy sonorities of Ligetis Lontano, the
ferocious, atonal hammering of Cecil Taylors solo performances, or a
faint, undecipherable background radio broadcast in a performance by
AMM?64 Neither being natural nor being correct provides an
unerring path to musical serenity, let alone aesthetic merit. A Picardy
third, beloved by someone when she is twenty, may have become to
her the equivalent of a (naturally irritating?) fingernail squeak on a
blackboard by the time she has turned forty.
Clearly, Diana Raffman does not enjoy atonal music (or at least did
not in the early 2000s). That is (or was) her privilege. She has not,
however, either discovered a necessary defect or uncovered a pervasive
fraud in this despised subgenre. She has merely attempted to justify her
distaste by suggesting that it is founded on both science and reason.
But the science is junk and the reasoning is bad. Let me not be overly
harsh here, however. Raffman may console herself in the fact that in
this sphere there will never be any science or reasoning that is
competent to the task she has in mind. Values, both moral and
aesthetic, are nearly identifiable by their resistance both to scientific
investigation and philosophical proofs. At any rate, for my own part,
Ich habe genug! Let there be an end to all this absurd and largely
fallacious theorizing! Let us just listen!
26
NO T E S
1. Diana Raffman, Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27/1 (2003): 6987.
2. Ibid., 86. As suggested by this charge, most of the focus of
Raffmans article is on twelve-tone composition, but she indicates
that she takes her claims to extend to atonal music generally, since,
on her view, serial technique is just an especially strict form of
atonal composition (69).
3. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal
Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
4. See in particular James Boros, A New Totality? Perspectives of
New Music 33/12 (1995): 538553; Fred Lerdahl, Tonality and
Paranoia: A Reply to Boros, Perspectives of New Music 34/1
(1996): 242251; and James Boros, A Response to Lerdahl,
Perspectives of New Music 34/1 (1996): 252258.
5. Not everyone has done so. In the papers cited above, James Boros
questions a number of the conclusions that Lerdahl draws from
various results in empirical cognitive psychology. Furthermore, I
believe it is instructive that significant portions of classic instruction
manuals in dodecaphony are devoted to techniques that can be
used to keep traditional tonal structures from polluting twelvetone music. See, for example, Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique (New York: Schirmer,
1940). If local structures of serial pieces can closely resemble those
of tonal works, and the latter forms are recognizable in the manner
approved by Raffman, it could be argued that the former must be
so as well. I will discuss this issue in more detail below. Finally, the
view that twelve-tone music is not a species of tonality is subjected
to a lengthy critique in Richard Norton, Tonality in Western
Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1984). Norton says, for example, If twelve-tone music canand
does at timescompletely efface key-centered music (and all
characteristic loyalties) how does it remain tonal? The answer is a
simple one: by the continuing operation of the cognitive ratio as
composer upon the inherited reservoir of pitch data, that is, twelve
pitches within the chromatic scale. Taking the half-step as the
smallest melodic and harmonic point of reference, twelve-tone
composers both speculated upon and composed a music in which
27
28
29
30
24. Raffman, 86. Obviously, Raffmans claim would not be quite right
even if her contentions about linguistic similarities were correct,
because, surely, one can try to express something but (unintentionally) use inappropriate means for the task. That is,
fraudulence would seem to require an intent to deceive, and ought
not to be alleged merely on the basis that one has used ineffective
media for the production of some effect.
25. Stanley Cavell, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy, in
Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976), 84. Cavell seems to conclude that, where there are
no touchstones of tonality present, the answer to the But is it
music? question is largely a function of whether the piece is
intentionally fraudulent. I shall discuss the accusation of fraud
perpetration in Section IV.
26. Alan H. Goldman, Value, in The Routledge Companion to
Philosophy and Music, ed. Kania and Gracyk (London: Routledge
2011), 155164.
27. Ibid., 161.
28. Ibid.
29. There is a current top-ten radio hit (All of Me by John Legend
and Toby Gad) whose lyrics contain the following consecutive
lines: Whats going on in that beautiful mind? I'm on your
magical mystery ride. These lines make two extremely trite pop
culture references, but my fourteen-year-old daughter was not
familiar with either the Beatles album and song or the book and
movie about John Nash until I mentioned these facts to her. Her
appreciation of the song was increased as a result of this
esoterica. We could refuse to call such appreciation aesthetic,
but I believe it would be quite difficult to make any sensible
distinction about what counts as aesthetic pleasure that excludes
recognition of extra-musical quotations but includes recognition
of, for example, an insertion of a melodic passage from Bach or
Cole Porter. Such exclusion would likely make the appropriateness
of a setting of a poem or libretto aesthetically irrelevant.
30. Lerdahl, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,
118.
31. Ibid.
31
32. Ibid., 118120. Although Lerdahl is not clear about this, I take it
that the potential of some piece to tax our grammatical capabilities to the limit is again considered only a necessary, and not a
sufficient, condition for that work to be of high aesthetic merit.
33. Ray Jackendoff, Music and Language, in Gracyk and Kania, The
Routledge Companion, 111.
34. Ibid., 111112.
35. Milton Babbitt, Who Cares if You Listen? High Fidelity (Feb.
1958).
36. Richard Taruskin, The Poietic Fallacy, in The Danger of Music
and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009) 319320.
37. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Twentieth Century Music, World
University Library (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 203.
38. Taruskin, No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage, in
The Danger of Music, 261279.
39. Taruskin finds a similarity between the sound of Boulezs Structures
for Two Pianos and Cages Music of Changes and believes he has
uncovered the reason for it: What both composers accomplished
with these works was the replacement of spontaneous compositional choiceschoices that, in Cages oft-incanted phrase,
represented memory, tastes, likes and dislikeswith transcendent
and impersonal procedures. . . . The difference between Boulez and
Cage was only superficially a conflict between order and anarchy.
It was, rather, a conflict between disciplines, both eminently
authoritarian, both bent on stamping out the artists puny person
so that something realer, less vulnerable, might emerge. Cages
chance operations, very rigorous and very tedious, were just as
effective a path to transcendence as Boulezs or Babbitts
mathematical algorithms Ibid., (264).
40. I find it amusing that while Goldman finds ultimate support for his
defense of (apparently algorithm eschewing) tonality in Hegel:
Music . . . represents the purest kind of Hegelian overcoming of
matter by mind, the purest expression of the creative human
spirit(Value., 164), Taruskin lays most of the blame for what he
considers Schoenbergian and Cagean confusions right at Hegels
feet. These errors are claimed by Taruskin to be a direct result of
the Hegelianization of music history (Taruskin, The Danger of
Music), 301329.
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the tonal system, to the point where certain aspects of tonal form
are inextricable from tonality. Similarly, the twelve-tone system
possesses its own particular form generating tendencies, based on
the sorts of relationships available within it. However, given the
wide range of strategies available in each system, it is not inconceivable that there may be an intersection of the two systems
strategies which might lead to a degree of similarity that would not
belie the integrity of either tonality or the twelve-tone system.
Tonal Forms in Arnold Schoenbergs Twelve-Tone Music,
Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987), 92.
58. Raffman, 85.
59. Cavell, Music Discomposed, in Must We Mean What We Say,
193.
60. Cavell notes that Saint-Sans thought Rite of Spring was a base
trick and ended up stripped of dignity himself.
61. Ibid., 205206.
62. In his contribution to David Copes colloquy on computer
creation of works in the style of Bach, Daniel Dennett notes that,
Many find this vision of creativity deeply unsettling. Some would
add that it is . . . crass, shallow, philistine, despicable, or even
obscene. Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble, in
Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001) 283.
63. Consider again the effect that particular row choices have had in
Berg. Scruton has written that in that composers Violin Concerto,
the serial organization is subverted by the use of a tone-row
which divides into two distinct and clearly tonal regions: G minor,
and B major/F sharp major. And from the outset the serial
structure is submerged by the surface elaborations. There is a
melodic movement, beginning in the first motif on arpeggiated
fifths, that sustains itself through repetition and parallelism, and
causes us to hear tonal harmonies even in the most discordant of
the orchestral chords. When the music comes home at last, to the
lovely prayer in which Berg quotes from Bachs setting of Es ist
genug, it comes home also to the second tonality of the tone-row,
and uses all the devices of triadic tonality. Scruton, The Aesthetics
of Music 298298. Obviously, one cant subvert tone rows without consideration of their pitch orders and how they will be used.
Another example of the effect of twelve-tone choices on the feel of
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