Keith you said:
>
> As I see it, governments will increasingly have to concentrate on the
> taxation of property and visible goods -- as they did in the Middle Ages.
I don't get that. In an age of virtual knowledge imitating art you are
going to only tax property? Do you plan to tax patents and copywrites?
The dealing with this was such a bust in the last century that the
Intellectual Property Rights collapsed as viable businesses. Today such a
collapse would destroy the internet and all information research, like it
did composers.
Indeed musical ignorance reached such a point as a result that even the
future of music has been cast in doubt as you have pointed out in the past.
To make this point I am attaching an article by a Master composer and
teacher David Krahenbuhl who was head of the Yale Music Theory Department,
founded the Journal of Music Theory, was the protege of Paul Hindemith at
Yale and who decided during the later years of his life to develop programs
for the next generation of musicians and pianists at the local level. He
and my old teacher started a Magazine, developed a theory program for the
first seven years of piano study and wrote vociferously until his death
about the way to teach the knowledge, enjoyment and theory of new music to
the next generation. This article was published in last months Keyboard
Companion Magazine and is a memorial reprint to the work that he did his
business partner and my teacher Richard Chronister who died last month.
As for alternate currencies. We already do that. But we don't talk much
about it. With the terrible situation here with "Neo-liberal" anti-art
policies we are forced to do something that Bill Gates is only now learning
about. I would suggest that its implications holds more peril than any
government anti-monoloply suit. However they are all connected. The
future is up in the air and once again, like the artists pioneering
gentrification in city ghettos, we have walked the path before the current
"urban sprawl of noisy home owners."
Ray Evans Harrell
from the Summer 2001 issue Keyboard Companion Magazine
How Different Is Modern Music?
Article by David Kraehenbuehl
For a composer, this is the easiest question in the world to answer. Modern
music is no more different than modern music has always been. This means
that it is a little bit different from music written ten years ago, very
different from music written two hundred years ago. And that is why so many
find it too different to enjoy. Most of the music that is taught today was
written a hundred to two hundred years ago. Many of the teaching pieces we
use, although written this year, are in styles that are a hundred to two
hundred years old. By comparison, even the mildest of modern idioms is very
different. It is this shocking difference between the very old and the very
new that makes the new so difficult for many of us. But this is no problem
for a child; and, if it becomes one, it is our fault as teachers. For a
child, modern music is not different at all. What could it be different
from? It relates to the world around him, the world that he knows first-hand
as a kaleidoscopic variety of exciting experiences and exciting sounds. He
hears it every day in the rumble of a distant expressway, in the sound of
the midnight plane as he lies awake, in the rhythm of dead leaves rattling
in the wind, in the summer night's orchestra from the nearby swampy place.
Like a good composer, his ears are always tuned for the new and different in
the vibrant world of rhythm and sound that is all around him. Then, too, he
hears modern music constantly in radio commercials and as the background to
movies and TV shows. Modern music is everywhere; he can't miss it.
Obviously, he enjoys it.
Perhaps we should take a very old piece of advice and become as little
children. We may discover that it is really very easy to enjoy our own
music, the music of our own time. Unfortunately, for us to become as little
children is not easy. But let's try an exercise in it. We will try to
experience a piece of modern music as a child would.
The piece we will use ("Vacation") was written expressly for children by a
university professor, Ross Lee Finney (see below). Before you look at it, I
should tell you that Mr. Finney is a very advanced musical thinker who
teaches graduate music courses at the University of Michigan. To understand
his very modern music, you must know something about an involved
contemporary technique of composition called twelve-tone technique. This is
the same technique that Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern used to compose
their dissonant, atonal music. This piece is atonal because, although its
key signature is C major, it uses lots of flats and sharps. Atonal music
isn't really in any key. This piece ends with a kind of A major chord, but
this isn't a proper tonic. That is because it is atonal. In any case, the
piece couldn't be in A major because it uses d sharp right at the beginning.
What are you thinking? If my guess is right, most of you are thinking that
you would rather not look at this piece after all. I wrote that last
paragraph deliberately to show how easy it is to leave the impression that
modern music is strange, inaccessible, and probably not particularly
desirable. The paragraph includes a number of irrelevant, trivial, and
possibly prejudicial observations regarding a fine children's piece by a
fine modern composer. And yet it includes nothing but statements that I have
heard from teachers. Let's see what is the matter with it.
To begin with, we are talking about music that may not have been heard by
our audience. Furthermore, we are telling them that it will be no use to
hear it until they "understand" it. Put that way, it is a pretty silly
request. How can anyone understand a piece of music that he has not heard,
and what better way is there to understand a piece than to hear it? We
should never talk about, or listen to talk about, music that we have not
heard. How many are there who are certain that Schoenberg and Webern wrote
ugly, distasteful music? And yet, they have never heard a note of either. A
child wouldn't make such a mistake. Children have opinions about only those
experiences that they know first hand. Their prejudices about what they do
not know first hand are learned from us. If we wish to be like little
children, we must reserve judgment on any musical experience until we have
actually had the experience. More often than not, we will be pleasantly
surprised.
My paragraph has another glaring fault. We never find out what Mr. Finney's
piece is about. Knowing that it is entitled "Vacation" explains its whole
nature. Vacations are something we all know about; we look forward to them
eagerly; we make lively preparations for them; we feel like jumping up and
down with excitement as the time for departure approaches; we anticipate
freedom ecstatically. Hearing "Vacation," remembering what this meant to us
as children, we understand and enjoy Mr. Finney's piece at once. He has
captured vividly every facet of his subject. What difference does it make
that the piece is constructed from a chromatic scale? Are not the occasional
sharp dissonances a perfect way to express the confusion of vacation
preparations? Do not the bright, parallel triads make us feel excited? Isn't
everyone satisfied with the finality of the ending, proper triad or not?
What does it matter if some of the sounds are a little unfamiliar? The
enthusiasm with which a child approaches a vacation is perfectly depicted.
This is what a child asks of music. He wants a clear re-creation in sound
and rhythm of an experience that he knows. We, like children, should ask
first what a piece is about, and second, is it really about it?
I see some puzzled expressions. Is that all there is to it? Don't we need to
know a lot more about a piece of music than that? Of course we must. But do
most of the things we tell children about music really tell them how it is
made? In fact, do most of the things we tell ourselves about a modern
composition help us to understand it very much? I'm afraid not.
Let's look again at our unhappy paragraph. We say that "Vacation" is atonal
because it has the key signature of C major and uses lots of flats and
sharps. What does all that mean? What is an atonal piece? One without tones,
perhaps? And does an absence of sharps and flats at the beginning of a piece
mean the key of C? Not necessarily. And, on hearing the piece, are we not
completely convinced that it ends clearly in the key of A major on a tonic
triad with an added second?
Our difficulty with modern music is largely our own fault. We have turned a
number of half-truths and even falsehoods about the nature of music into
value judgments. And, worse yet, we pass on these hazy value judgments to
our students. Keys and scales are all-important to us. A piece that isn't
clearly in a key, that doesn't make obvious use of the notes of a particular
key-scale, becomes suspect. Parallel fifths are "wrong" and a piece that
uses them is therefore "way out." Music is made of dominant-tonic
progressions; a piece that isn't made of such progressions may not be music.
The list of our requirements for a proper piece or the proper understanding
of a piece is endless and largely beside the point. If a child can read and
play effectively a lively piece of music, is his understanding improved by
telling him that it is made of dominant and tonic chords in the key of A
major, and the complicated parts are accidentals? Of course not. Who would
assume that a child's understanding of a lively story would be improved by
telling him that it uses verbs and nouns from a six hundred and fifty word
vocabulary, and the complicated sentences are the ones with adverbs and
adjectives?
What, then, would improve our understanding of a piece of music, any piece
of music, modern or not? To think as a composer thinks; and, happily, good
composers think like children. They think about sounds-bright sounds, dark
sounds, sharp sounds, soft sounds, thick sounds, thin sounds-a whole
wonderful palette of sounds. And they think about time-time going fast,
going slow, going steadily, going jerkily, flowing, stopping-all the many
delightful, dancing shapes that time may take. And they shape time to say
what they have to say. How do they shape time? By controlling the changing
of sounds. To play a piece well, we must observe and understand, in its
proper proportion, every kind of change in it. We must play the piece in
such a way that important changes sound important, unimportant changes sound
unimportant. A distorted performance results when we emphasize what the
composer considered unimportant, when we overlook what the composer
considered essential.
Let's look again at "Vacation" to see what we can find out about change and
the shape of time in it. These are the things a performer must understand
about a piece. The first eight bars fall into four two-bar groups. Notice
how the composer makes one surprising change just before the beginning of
each two-bar group. At the end of the second, fourth, and sixth bars, he
brings one chord in the right hand that is different from the A major triad.
It is this really different chord, put in just before the bar line, that
makes us feel the beginning of the third, fifth, and seventh bars as new
starts. A composer in the eighteenth century would have put a dominant chord
before each bar line, not because dominant chords must come before tonic
chords, but because the dominant chord would be a surprising change. Mr.
Finney, living in the twentieth century, finds dominant chords a rather dull
change. He chooses a brighter, fresher change to express his lively feelings
about a vacation.
Now let's look at the third line. Here, Mr. Finney wants a real change in
order to start an important new section of his piece. He adds a new highest
note and a new lowest note to his music. And what notes does he add? G's.
And if we look closely, we will see that these are really brand-new notes.
Mr. Finney has never used a g of any kind before this ninth bar of his
piece. The g's then are a real change, an exciting surprise; and, as
performers, we know that they are so important that we must bring them out.
There are other differences between the first eight bars and the second
eight bars of the piece. The second section still has triads in the right
hand, but they change more often; likewise, the left hand has many more
sixteenth notes. Time seems to be racing. Why? Because changes are taking
place much more frequently. As performers, we know this will be a dangerous
passage. When time gets hectic, we get hectic. We rush or we stumble. Also,
the sound of the whole passage is more complex, more dissonant, more
strained than the opening eight bars. The notes do not fit together as
neatly as they did in the first part. There are many different kinds of
sounds instead of just a few. Where the bass clef sign appears in the fourth
stave, the composer has added a lot of notes in the left hand that have
never been used before. It is with a sense of relief that we come back in
bar 17 to the more reasonable music that started the piece off.
For Mr. Finney, an exact restatement of the beginning of the piece would be
too dull to represent real excitement. He has heightened the liveliness of
the music by making everything higher than it was at the beginning and by
putting the fast notes on top where they will surely be heard. And, in the
last line of the piece he uses the highest note of all, a b that he has
never used before. The piece rises continuously, getting more and more
excited. As performers, we must make sure that the right hand is clearly
heard through the fifth and sixth lines of the piece. It is the right hand
that makes the return of the opening so fresh and exciting.
And now we go off on our vacation, disappearing into the distance. Having
reached the peak of excitement, we finally relax. How does Mr. Finney shape
time to depict this? The changes in the music become very few and very
familiar. Time slows down. The b, which was the last important new element
to be added, just stays on and on, right out to the end of the piece. We are
so familiar with it that it doesn't disturb us at all when it lingers on in
the middle of the A major chord at the close of the piece.
This is the way a composer makes a piece. He doesn't think about keys and
key-scales, about "proper" progressions, about parallel fifths. He thinks
about what he has to say and how he can shape time with sounds to say it. He
starts with a sound, any sound, and then makes a different sound, a lot
different or a little different, as he wishes. If we could learn to look at
music that way, we would discover that no music is really different. All
music is a lively, expressive pattern of sound in time telling us again
about ourselves, our experiences, our feelings, the universe around us. Any
child knows this. Why is it so hard for us to learn it?
