What tonality/atonality means to me

THAT is the real formula, it has almost nothing to do with the piece of art, no matter if it's Bach or a toilet seat, you can make it famous. You can make it "worth studying," and you can make it affect society at large. All you need is knowing what it takes to do it, what the conditions are, and you're set. In a sense, it's like market research indeed, with very similar goals.

But anyways, I've said all of this before haven't I? :x

You can try to cloak falsehoods all you want, but ultimately bad art will always be bad art, and even if people try to make 2+2=5 with a very clever marketing scheme, someone will come along and find out it's nonsense. It's easy to make something which manipulates the social construct, but harder to create art of true value. And if you think Shakespeare or Beethoven's 5th symphony aren't worth studying because it's just mere marketing and of dubious subjective worth, there's a major problem there. At least that's what I believe, and I know many others do as well.

Look at the new prodigy composer Jay Greenberg who is 12 and went to Julliard at around 11. His symphonies were already performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, his teachers compare him to Mozart, his music is extremely well-marketed, he has his own "sony" website. It's great. People probably listened to him more in one year than all the contemporary classical music composer's work combined. Does that mean his work is better than these other composers? Of course not. It's funny you believe successful marketing and popularity to be the ONLY arbiter of worth. Sure, they are a huge factor, but not everything. I hope we can at least agree on that.

Also, what kind of marketing schemes are required, since, according to you they are all this is needed to perpetuate the idea of "greatness"? Clearly, if they say a work is 'good' and a person hears it and knows it isn't, they won't trust the advertisement. Yes, much of good marketing is self-fulfilling psychology, but it also has to deliver on its claims. Hype is easy to generate, but hard to deliver on. And who/what decides if it measures up? The viewers, listeners, critics. All of these believe their judgments are right. And these judgments could be wholly contradictory. But once a few critics judge a work as great, we have to next observe whether this consensus transcends current cultures. Sadly, it may be true in some cases, as you'll agree, that any critic judging it will be influenced by their culture and previous cultures. Thus, it does become harder for the influence of a previous culture to affect a critic in a way that creates a bias in his judgment (which I suspect is partly your reason for why critics' judgment is mere subjective speculation). But it isn't mainly that Beethoven's 5th is so great because critics today merely listened to previous critics' judgment, it makes more sense that it is great because Beethoven's 5th is really a great work objectively, regardless of whether or not you like Symphonic music/classical music/etc. It's the natural selection of ideas. Some bad ideas may be perpetuated for a while, but ultimately the superior ideas stand out. And that superior ideas exist is quite strong evidence for the existence of objective value and worth. For example, medicine is a great idea. Despite the huge hype surrounding the worth of medicine, many people don't want to take it. However, many of those who do take medicine correctly experience a higher degree of health. Since correct and safe medicine generally contributes to human health, it is therefore of high objective value for HUMAN BEINGS.

The problem with talk of the "inherent value" of music is that no music has inherent value to one who's been deaf his entire life.

People probably listened to him more in one year than all the contemporary classical music composer's work combined.

More than Penderecki, Part, Gorecki, or Adams? I think not! Believe me, there is an audience for people like Stockhausen, and it isn't miniscule as it may appear. Not that that's even relevant, really. Popularity is no indicator of anything.

For example, medicine is a great idea. Despite the huge hype surrounding the worth of medicine, many people don't want to take it. However, many of those who do take medicine correctly experience a higher degree of health. Since correct and safe medicine generally contributes to human health, it is therefore of high objective value for HUMAN BEINGS.

Well, music isn't science, and even though pitches and things like that are, that's irrelevant. Medicine isn't art (unless you call it art). Science is objective, for the most part. Art is not. Don't try to compare them.

"Natural selection" of ideas isn't a quality feature. The only thing this tells us is that a specific idea is more fit to prevail under certain circumstances. It doesn't make it "better".

And you certainly can't compare something as clearly teleological as medicine, that serves a well-defined purpose and has easily judgeable results, to art.

It also is pointless to seek for any validation of a piece of art outside of culture. Art is, and has always been, a cultural phenomenon. Any "value" that it may or may not have stands in relation to the cultural context it appears in.

It's impossible to achieve strict atonality, even if no tone is repeated, certain tones, because of register, color, timbre, etc will become more centralized than others.

Cuz white noise sure lends itself to "tonality"...

You can try to cloak falsehoods all you want, but ultimately bad art will always be bad art, and even if people try to make 2+2=5 with a very clever marketing scheme, someone will come along and find out it's nonsense. It's easy to make something which manipulates the social construct, but harder to create art of true value. And if you think Shakespeare or Beethoven's 5th symphony aren't worth studying because it's just mere marketing and of dubious subjective worth, there's a major problem there. At least that's what I believe, and I know many others do as well.

Yeah, see, that's your opinion. Which is fine, but I don't see how far it'll get you since you're just going to be making it all up as you go along and obviously find contradicting examples. You can't substantiate what "bad art" is, which is really the problem with what you're saying. Speaking of which, it in no way compares to 2+2=5, and likewise 2+2=5 could be great for art!

And, speaking of which, this is exactly the same argument AA has always done. "There must be objective value!!!!" but, well, no evidence! Just SAYING there is doesn't make it so.

You have literally no way to prove that Beethoven's 5th will hold up if space aliens were to hear it, completely oblivious to earth's musical traditions and cultures. Maybe they'll find it just a bunch of random wacky noises and rather have it destroyed! Shakespeare on the other hand can be as well TRANSLATED and it should retain some measure of sense, despite of course seeming rather bizarre if there's no context to back it up. (Arts are not interchangeable!)

But here you'll say "OH but aliens are not humans and their ears bla bla" imagine that these aliens ARE exactly like humans. You have to show that they make the exact same value judgments (it still doesn't really explain WHY at all, but well at least consistent results would give something to study.)

The case is, however, that I think Beethoven's 5th is a piece of trash (despite how interesting it may or not be for analysis or history, I rather pound nails into my eyes than hear it) and a lot of Shakespeare is unreadable (if still interesting in theory.) Unlike you however, I don't really think my opinions are absolute, so that's fine. If they want to think Beethoven's 5th is scraggy, good for them, if they don't, good for them too. It's called opinion, taste, etc and unless you can trace a biological bias that we all SHOULD HAVE that ALWAYS favors the same outcome, then you're wasting your time thinking it's otherwise.

I've explained it a thousand times, a million times even.

To "prove" that any value argument in art is objective, there NEEDS to be scientific evidence that:

A: Art has an universal PURPOSE (which is non-subjective) so that we can measure how well different art performs within an objective standard (in other words, we need to define "best" art according to that purpose so we can also get "worse" art and "average" art, etc) and

B: There is a biological disposition that is present in EVERY single human being that WILL always favor X or Y music elements, concrete and simple music elements.

The impossibility of statement A should be rather obvious, if not then I suppose reading on the widely contrasting views of what art is not a hard thing to do. Likewise, there's no real evidence that anyone can come up with to show that Art is X, as all it takes to revert that is make it popular that Art is Y (cultural turnover negates the evidence outright.)

The impossibility of point B should ALSO be obvious by now, otherwise there simply wouldn't be fans to music like Stockhausen's, Boulez, Penderecki, Cage, etc etc etc, or art in general which isn't "classic art" (if that's the standard we're particularly using, as this argument tends to always favor traditional rather than modern art.) Make it fashionable to listen to X, no matter what X is, and it'll be instilled in the culture, it'll be "great" and worth studying surely to many. Variety that we've seen in the 20th century modern music is simply too large and widely distributed to be an "anomaly." The real argument for variety is that it's simply possible, therefore if it's possible it negates evidence that X or Y elements must always be present. As usual, I like to come to my "poop sandwich" example of what a real biological bias looks like. If you don't know what that is, look it up in my other posts.

What it always comes down to with these arguments is that they spring out of the need to somehow validate "what is traditional" in art versus everything new and contrasting, as if to justify why we even bother with any of it. Truth is, we really don't need any of our respective cultural traditions; they're just an added bonus to our living experiences but it can all vanish and we'll still be able to function (and create our own culture regardless of what happened in the past) anyway.

They also come from a usually european-centric viewpoint, again, seemingly trying to validate it against other cultures (or tendencies within the same culture.) It would be interesting to see someone Chinese come on the forum and start arguing that the Chinese traditional music instruments and compositions are "much more valuable" than everything the western culture has put out. There are surely people who think so as well, but they have the very same problems getting their argument anywhere, even out of the starting line, without falling on their face.

This measure of competition (This art/culture is BETTER than this other art/culture!) IS a bad idea, if there ever was one, as it motivates nothing. Although having opinions is natural and normal, asserting them to be objectively superior to other people's is a non-argument, not to mention counter productive.

I'm seriously getting tired of addressing this over and over by now.

This short clip pretty much expresses my feelings:

YouTube - Zw

This short clip pretty much expresses my feelings:

YouTube - Zw

Hi, everyone should check this out immediately:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Make-way-for-bio-aesthetics-3989

Hi, everyone should check this out immediately:

Make way for bio-aesthetics by John Derbyshire - The New Criterion

I'll save everyone's time:

Dutton’s treatment of music is skimpier. Darwin was intrigued by this topic, and spilled four thousand words on it in The Descent of Man under the general heading “Secondary Sexual Characteristics of Man.” Darwin’s conviction was that our appreciation of music has something to do with sexual selection, a principal theme of The Descent. His speculations were vague, though, and Dutton does not do much to advance them. He does note some particular curiosities of music: our tolerance for repetition in this art form, for example. We can hear a symphony hundreds of times, yet still find pleasure in hearing it again. Nobody wants to read a novel or watch a movie that many times (though poetry is an intermediate case).

The connections between language and music are not very surprising, since both come to us through our ears. The “attack” of an instrumental note—its first tenth of a second or less—seems to be processed by the brain just as the initial consonant of a word is. Since language is almost surely an evolved adaptation, possibly music is one of its by-products. It is all a bit of a mystery, though, and Dutton throws up his hands at last:

Pitched sounds … became the basis for a great art form despite having no survival implications whatsoever. While I am persuaded by the plausibility of Darwin’s speculations about mating cries being somehow involved in the origins of music, to trace a continuous route from primordial calls to The Art of the Fugue will never be possible.

That there is something innate about our musical appreciation is demonstrated by the story of Webern’s mailman. The evolutionary sources of that appreciation, however, still await explanation, even at a speculative level.

That is to say, nothing new if you've actually researched the topic and follow neurology/evolutionary musicology (which are way ahead of what Darwin was saying, in fact almost disproving that altogether.)

PS: Oh, the "await explanation" bit is bullshit, just in case anyone's keeping score.

PS2: Also worth seeing what this amazon review of the same book argues, as I suspected was the case the moment I saw the title:

My biggest problem with these explanations is that they focus on the easy cases of representative art. Dutton dismisses 'dadaism' and abstract art as not really art, suggests that scents never developed into an art because they are not reperesentative in nature, and is at a complete loss to explain music as an art (other than to rehash Darwin's suggestion that love for music may stem from our affinity for language and bird songs.) And his discussion very unkowingly dismisses that fact that, attached to our love for art is a love for decoration and style in the sense of having nice looking things (bedsheets for instance). Very few of these fall within the purview of representative art, which leaves all of this outside the purview of Dutton's narrow theory.

LOL.

Thx ssc.

But assuming that it arised as it claims...

With no survival implication... does it matter? Why would it matter so long as it appeals to someone, even as a counter-evolutionary way?

I'm a big fan of Spengler's concepts, so I'm outgunned on music history...

Well the problem with Darwin's idea is that, while we can find an entire species of birds singing almost exactly the same (sexual selection motivated displays, etc) it's really absurd to pretend that this holds true for music at all, or art even. We'd need the same kind of observable evidence (all music must be SOMEWHAT the same!) but what do we get? Obviously none of that, no analog to the birds/peacock/etc all doing practically the same exact things. If it "branches" out into diversity, the sexual selection aspect is irrelevant at that point since it depends on a narrow set of objective values for it to work.

PS: Also remember the time Darwin lived in, he had no way of knowing what the 20th century would look like, or what music in other parts of the world sounded like at all. If he did, he must've overlooked it or taken an european-centric position.

PS2: For more info actually:

He also makes important concessions, acknowledging, for instance, the confounding resistance of music to natural selection theory: pitched sounds are elusive in nature, so the ability to decipher or deploy them would not help anyone survive.

from Book Review: Art Instinct, Denis Dutton - B&N Review

Obviously expected, again, for ALL the things I've said up to now.

PS3: More comments!

Like Steven Pinker, whose writing inspires much of The Art Instinct, Dutton reserves his harshest criticisms for the modernists, whom he holds responsible for things like "pure abstraction in painting, atonality in music, random word-order poetry, Finnegans Wake, and readymades," such as the upside-down urinal made famous by Marcel Duchamp. Such unpleasant works of art are inspired, Dutton says, by a "blank-slate view of culture," which assumes that the mind can learn to appreciate just about anything. As a result, modern artists have delighted in being difficult: They've given us works of abstraction when all we really wanted was a grassy landscape with an eminent figure such as George Washington.

The problem with such "evolutionary aesthetics" is that, in the end, they excel at explaining kitsch. Our Pleistocene preferences might justify the work of Komar and Melamid, or the neo-impressionist art of "painter of light" Thomas Kinkade, but when everything in the Museum of Modern Art violates your theory of aesthetics, then it might be worth revising the theory. Just because the laws of human nature as presently understood can't explain the allure of Mark Rothko doesn't mean we should stop looking at his paintings. It just means we don't understand human nature very well.

This time from The Frontal Cortex : The Art Instinct

;)

Wow there is still interest in this thread. In that case, let me elaborate more on my original post. I think the decription of tonality/atonality as palettes is elegant because:

1. Just as a palette says nothing about artistry, neither does 'tonality' nor 'atonality'.

2. Just as a painting can be painted by mixing different palettes, so can music.

3. Just as a 24-color set is more expensive/valuable than a 12-color set, a larger sound palette affords richer musical possibilities.

The only difference between tonality and atonality is that atonality doesn't supply a sense of personal taste or sensory stimulus other than a distinct insolent bleakness. Amongst people who are endlessly searching, this may seem like an alluring black hole, but among paying customers, it is rarely little more than wayward, childish nonsense which fails to uplift.

The only difference between tonality and atonality is that atonality doesn't supply a sense of personal taste or sensory stimulus other than a distinct insolent bleakness. Amongst people who are endlessly searching, this may seem like an alluring black hole, but among paying customers, it is rarely little more than wayward, childish nonsense which fails to uplift.

I'm glad to see you have answered this question once and for all, and we may all rest assured now in the verity of your words.

Although, I'd be tempted to say that a bit of humility goes a long way.

I really think you're confusing your opinion and apparently limited understanding of music with some sort of absolute "fact". I, for one, happen to not find most "atonal" music bleak, as you put it. I've found a great many works which are not easily defined as "tonal" to be quite uplifting and emotional. And "childish" is probably the last adjective I would choose to describe this music.

The only difference between tonality and atonality is that tonality doesn't supply a sense of personal taste or sensory stimulus other than a distinct insolent bleakness. Amongst people who are endlessly searching, this may seem like an alluring black hole, but among paying customers, it is rarely little more than wayward, childish nonsense which fails to uplift.

Fix'd.

But really, this is flamebait just like his other (now deleted) posts at best. :/

The only difference between tonality and atonality is that atonality doesn't supply a sense of personal taste or sensory stimulus other than a distinct insolent bleakness. Amongst people who are endlessly searching, this may seem like an alluring black hole, but among paying customers, it is rarely little more than wayward, childish nonsense which fails to uplift.

Would you mind backing up your comments here? In particular, I'd like you to expand upon your statement that 'atonality doesn't supply a sense of personal taste or sensory stimulus other than a distinct insolent bleakness.' I assume judging by your choice of words there, that you have an actual treatise/study/or compiled research data that backs up this claim.

I live in what I like to call a 'conservative' musical city: Indianapolis. Here, we have very few ensembles devoted to performance of modern music. Most of the 'paying public' often comment the same on hearing modern music: (negatively: squeak and squack. positively: driving, american, lively, new). Our symphony Orchestra performs a vast mixture of music from the past 300 years. And generally, what you see in the hall is this: those that don't like a piece go into the lobby during its performance... those that love a piece stay - it's really that simple AND imo not rude at all. You'd be surprised how many people actually are in the hall when the first notes of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (a very harsh piece, though tonal!) compared to those that stay during any piece by Bruckner. That said... I'd really also like to see some back up on this from you - since you do call atonal music childish and wayward.

Examples PLEASE!

Well, he clearly hasn't heard any atonal music. No use arguing with a troll.

Some cool stuff, posted in an attempt to draw this thread off-track.

Not quite atonal, but close enough. Also not Glenn Gould! :w00t:

Now this is truly depressing...

This thread is now about Glenn Gould playing ATONAL MUSIC... or in this case 12 tone music.

:D

The rest is on the same youtube channel, good stuff.