Preliminary Rant on Professor Raffman's Paper

Now Professor Raffman causes a problem for herself by jumping from "a piece of music" to "a work of art" [p. 70] Certainly, many of Schoenbeg's pieces are works of art. (something can be a work of art, I guess, even if it is seldom (never) performed. It seems to me that one cannot judge Schoenberg by American standards of taste. Let's consider the Arditti String Quartet vs. the Kronos Quartet in terms of works premiered by each quartet. The Arditti Quartet toured the North American continent biannually. While teaching positions were more numerous in North America the audience for `new' music was greater in Europe. If we look carefully at the Arditti works premiered verses the Kronos, we see that the former premiers works that are far more difficult that the works premiered by the latter. Why? My guess is that the Arditti's European audience is better prepared to accept new music than the Kronos's audience. The Kronos appeals more to their audiences visual sense, whereas the Arditti appeals more to its audience's aural sensibility. Now where are we going with this music-sociology?

If one wants to begin to understand Schoenberg and Babitt one should first of all listen to their music - lots of it in the dark. Point - if Schoenberg and Babbitt were performed more often, both in live performances and on the radio (and on TV!}, audiences would over time realize what's going on in their music and determine for themselves the value of their music. In stead their music which is rarely performed is criticized for not measuring up in the ears of listeners with music that has been performed countless times every day for over 200 years! Point - if one listened to Schoenberg and Babbitt every day, one would begin to understand their music; one would understand variations, intervalic relationships, melody articulated amongst various instruments, fast melodic lines and such. Think of Schoenberg and Babbitt as Miles Davis (say), as musicians who want to double-time the melodic bit so they can play what interests them - the early version of Miles' "Walkin'" compared to later versions.

200+ years of sonata-forms! Let's get past that and create some new, fast music.

More next time. Until then, study Alban Berg's "Why is Schoenberg's Music So Difficult to Understand?" and Gunther Schuller's interviews with Ethan Iverson.

Don't worry; I'll get to the technical bits of Professor Raffman's paper soon enough.

Let's think about Professor Raffman's title, "Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?" It reminds me of Professor Milton Babbitt's article with the catchy title, "Who Cares If They Listen?" In an interview aired on WKCR-FM a few days ago, Babbitt said that the title was not chosen by him - the editor of High Fidelity imposed that title against his wishes and in addition made cuts in the article. Point - one should listen to Babbitt's music and read his actual words. The following are links to Raffman, Berg and Schuller:

http://philosophy.utoronto.ca/people/linked-documents-people/DRaffman-Is%20Twelve-tone%20Music%20Artistically%20Defective.pdf

http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=478&Itemid=706&lang=en

http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-gunther-schuller-1.html

http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-gunther-schuller-2.html

Thanks to Jim Murphy for directing me to the Iverson-Schuller interviews.