To define Art Music, begin by cataloging its typically ascribed musical characteristics:
- derives from music tradition within classical Western civilization
- published as a musical score, specifying unambiguously all the composer wishes to be heard in a performance.
- organized into various styles and schools, marking evolution through early, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, modern music, and so on.
- exhibits complex and multi-layered harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structure, requiring the most advanced skills of composition, performance, and listening comprehension.
- in its purest form (absolute music), will have no explicit connection to any text or story.
- provides pleasure through pure power of a composer’s musical genius, which often will further transmit aspects of the composer’s fundamental humanism: e.g. excitement, joy, hope, want, grief, fascination, resignation, love gained or lost, simple pleasures (rain on the window, the motion of water in a brook, a stroll through the country on a pleasant day), human needs (e.g. to be loved, to be accepted by others, to be comforted by others), spiritual uplift, virtues such as charity, compassion, valor, honor, and so on.
Per Schönberg, “There are relatively few people who are capable of understanding, purely in terms of music, what music has to say. The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another is as widespread as only the false and banal can be. Nobody expects such a thing from any other art; ••• in the other arts the material-subject, the represented object, automatically presents itself [even] to the limited power of comprehension of the intellectually mediocre. Since music as such lacks a material-subject, some look beyond its effects for purely formal beauty, others for poetic procedures.”
Per Schopenhauer [quoted by Schönberg], “The composer reveals the inmost essence of the world and utters the most profound wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand, —even he loses himself later when he tries to translate details of this language which the reason does not understand into our terms. It must, however, be clear to him that in this translation into the terms of human language, which is abstraction, reduction to the recognizable, the essential, the language of the world, which ought perhaps to remain incomprehensible and only perceptible, is lost. But even so he is justified in this procedure, since after all it is his aim as a philosopher to represent the essence of the world, its unsurveyable wealth, in terms of concepts whose poverty is all too easily seen through. And Wagner too, when he wanted to give the average man an indirect notion of what he as a musician had looked upon directly, did right to attach programs to Beethoven’s symphonies.”
Brahms is an exemplar of music that is simultaneously serious (in a modern sense) and popular. Hence, for composers who embrace humanism as a universal motif, there is less risk of offending an audience of average musical perception. Rather, it is the avant-garde composers who most risk audience offense, those whose works are incomprehensible to any outside current musical academia (as an example, those whom Copland lists in his ‘very tough’ category). As a result, these experimentalists and experientialists risk their own status as important composers.
Musical academia risks its own future status as well, by pushing students to think too far outside the music box. What is the appeal of learning how many non-clarinet timbres a clarinet can be forced to generate; how many ways a piano can be played while not using the keyboard, or a violin using the back side of a bow; how many ways a computer can organize a set of tonalities? When deciding what to teach in the experimental faculty, school administrators need to ensure there be an adult in the room. And perhaps such institutions should measure their success by how often such music attains audiences outside their own faculties. Isn’t that the objective of art, and what distinguishes great art from the best-forgotten variety?
areas of interest 