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An Unenlightened Analysis of Atonality

As I said, this is unenlightened, which basically means that I have eyes for nothing other than the thing I want to rant about, and don't want to concern myself with background information. In other words, more newspaper journalists (as opposed to cereal-box journalists, I suppose) ought to be like me. 

In my view, as a composer of musical compositions myself, and as a keen aural listener of things in general, form is awfully important in music. And propriety. I don't suffer people who insinuate themselves into my home, and stick cutlery into my piano by way of experimenting with sounds. And if the sound of traffic appeals to you in any way, that might be a sign that you've contracted some fatal illness of the brain, and ought to put yourself in the hands of a competent doctor.

There are plenty of different ways to be a good composer, and no two of them need agree. Bach's music is characterized by a tendency to get arbitrarily complex in terms of form while putting harmony above all else. Chopin's music consists of simple, unpretentious melodies shrouded in intricate layers of color. Liszt is power and grandeur (with a weakness for diminished sevenths). Scriabin is apocalyptic and otherworldly. Given this panoply of composers who each represent the apotheosis of their respective individual endeavors in music, it doesn't really make sense to reduce music to simple definitions. 

But I think we can all agree that composing music is a creative process. One that requires effort, and results in organizing sound in some sensible way. Tonal music isn't necessarily more organized than atonal music, and it certainly doesn't have to be more pleasurable to listen to. (Even a few bars by a Mozart or Haydn are enough to send you running back into the loving arms of Schoenberg and Scriabin.) Tone clusters, however, are not creative. 

I had the misfortune the other day of listening to a few minutes of a piano concerto by Einojuhani Rautavaara that was advertised as being beautiful as well as making you think, or some such thing. For pages it was just tone clusters in the right hand and surreal runs in the left. His name shows more creativity than that.

And that brings us to another problem with music today. I always hear about modern music's astonishing ability to "make you think", but no one has ever explained to me what that means. Tapping on the piano or sitting in silence for a few minutes before an instrument is supposed to make you rethink your definition of music, perhaps? But some of this stuff seems a disingenuous attempt at rendering an already imprecise concept (as all art must perforce be) even more nebulous in order to admit the most random things into its fold. You don't even have to be a synaesthete anymore to claim that written language is essentially music, and the value of your music is determined entirely by your self-assuredness and ability to expatiate on it pretentiously. Oh, and political and/or social causes. A squashed fly on an empty sheet of paper is a masterpiece, if you say that it represents the oppression of the poor or something like that.

The only thing known for certain is that the pretentiousness of classical music enthusiasts, as I suppose they ought to be known, is increasing exponentially. If the universe were just, a muddy puddle would appear under their feet multiple times a day. Especially when they're dressed in fancy clothes.

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