Crammin' & Jammin'

I grew up with Arnold Schoenberg. In the early 1960s I wore out the Juilliard String Quartet's recordings of Schoenberg's 1st, 2nd and 3rd string quartets. After that I went to Robert Craft's wonderful Schoenberg recordings on Columbia Records - especially "Pellaeas and Melisande" and "Verklarerte Nacht". Next I went to the Fine Arts Quartet's Bartok. Then I got to the Budapest String Quartet's Beethoven string quartets - especially the late A minor quartet. And then to Pierre Boulez's "Le marteau sans maître" and Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Zeitmasze" - the Craft Columbia recording of these two works. Who were my guides? - Andre Hodeir (Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence and Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music), Gunther Schuller (Jazz Review), and Robert Craft's liner notes

Simply put Professors Raffman and Taruskin are listening to Schoenberg, Babbitt, Boulez and Martino through tonal training and with tonal ears. My music education was the other way round - I listened to Beethoven with atonal ears. The other problem with the Raffman and Taruskin argument is that they jump into  dissertations on stability relations - consonance , dissonance and cadence. These tonal aspects of music don't apply in tonal-ways to atonal music.

The jump from "can't hear tonal relationships in atonal music" to "atonal music is artistically defective" needs to be qualified to something akin to "I just don't get it; I can't hear the cadences I'm used to hearing." This makes sense - it could be a cognitive thing, a music training (academy) thing, or listening for something that's not there in the music. I'm inclined to think that it is the later (emphasized) consideration that's really what's really in play in Raffman and and Taruskin. The missing bits - cadences, key signature modulation, expansive melodies; all the 19th century stuff - weren't supposed to be there in the first place.

If one's music education begins with Coleman Hawkins, Charles Parker, Bud Powell, Monk et al., where a lot of cramming was going on, and Schoenberg; one doesn't miss what wasn't there in the first place. And if these treasured bits from the 19th century or the swing era are there in minute quantities and crammed in the tunes real fast; the fans of the music - and aestheticians! - won't hear them any way.

My next post will attend to Stanley Cavell's famous essay "Music Discomposed", a work that professor Raffman relies on in her essay.