Music: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd Edition by Nicholas Cook

Author:Nicholas Cook [Cook, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191038952
Google: _d8eEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Beyond authorship

If you stopped people at random in the streets of Vienna in 1800 and asked them to name the outstanding musicians of the previous quarter-century would they have said Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven? A century later, did they know they were living through the highpoint of Viennese modernism (not just Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg but a galaxy of celebrated writers and painters)? Probably not. All history—not just fake news—is built on processes of selection that filter out the vast majority of what happened and retain just enough to construct an intelligible narrative that is then taken to stand for the whole. And as we approach our own time it becomes increasingly hard to tell a story: there are too many facts and you don’t know which are the important ones. But I think there is more than that to the ubiquitous sense that today’s musical culture has become drastically fragmented, that now there are no big, coherent stories to be told. Actually that is a big story in itself. But there is also another: a move away from basic aesthetic tenets that until recently conditioned the idea of music in the West, and towards a quite different conception of what I shall call music as lifestyle. I am beginning that story here, but it is closely tied up with digital technology and I will complete it in the next chapter.

At one level, the story of musical modernism—meaning the classical tradition as it took on principles of modernist aesthetics shared across the arts in the 20th century—is one of constant and dramatic change. In terms of composition there was the development of atonality (music without the traditional organization round a ‘home’ key), of serialism (music built on strict sequences of pitches), of experimentalism (getting away from tradition and bringing music back to first principles), of minimalism (based on repetitive, sometimes mesmerizing patterns and creating crossovers with the groove-based genres of popular music), and of any number of other isms. Then there are the many composers who continued working in established styles—what you might call classical MOR (middle of the road)—and rarely made it into the history books that focused on stylistic innovation. The history books also ignored the vast majority of what actually went on in the 20th-century culture of classical music, which was performing and listening to earlier music. In performance, as we’ve seen, there was significant change, while technology brought about drastic changes in listening practices too.

But despite all this innovation and diversity, the classical-modernist tradition generally remained committed to more or less the same underlying aesthetic principles, the same basic conception of what music was and who it was for. Even if classical fan culture had subsided from its post-Beethoven peak, the culture as a whole remained strongly oriented towards composers as authors: they were the focus of aesthetic interest. Innovation was still a condition of admission into the canon, and in post-war avant-garde circles (including the improvisation ensembles I mentioned in Chapter 1) it became an obsession.

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