Why You Love Music by John Powell

Author:John Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music / Ethnomusicology, Psychology / Emotions, Science / Acoustics & Sound, Social Science / Popular Culture
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Schoenberg’s theoretical rebellion, which later acquired the labels “serialism” or “atonality,” produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars, and—in its purest, strictest form—not one piece of music, in a hundred years’ worth of effort, that a normal person could understand or enjoy.14

A defender of strict serialism might say that if people were exposed to more of it, they would start to understand it and love it more. But the problem is deeper than that. Serialism presents us poor humans with a number of intractable psychological difficulties.

First of all there’s the difficulty of remembering the “melody” of the row. All the world’s music systems involve having only about seven notes in play at any one time. (There are systems like the Indian one, which appears to have more at first glance, but a closer look reveals that there are actually about seven, although some of them have variants that are slightly lower or higher in pitch.) The clue to how many different notes could be in play at any one time was revealed back in 1956, when the psychologist George Miller wrote a landmark paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” in which he explained that the human short-term memory can cope with only about seven different things at any one time.15

The “only about seven things at a time” rule for your short-term memory applies to a wide variety of things, from remembering new names at a wedding party to recalling the items on that grocery list you left at home. It also applies to musical notes. It’s why, although we have twelve different notes in an octave, we generally use only a selection (or key) of about seven at a time. If you use Schoenberg’s serialism technique for composing music, every melody has twelve different notes. Although you might be able to remember the contour of such a melody, the chances of accurately remembering all those up-and-down jumps in pitch are very small.

Then there’s the harmony. In standard music a lot of the ebb and flow of the emotional content depends on the buildup of tension in the harmony followed by relaxation. Relaxed harmonies rely upon chords built up of notes that have strong interrelationships. Chords of this sort are plentiful in music that is based on keys but are scarce in the serial system. The serial composer can easily provide tension but can’t offer the relaxation that gives the tension context.

Finally, as I said earlier, there is the difficulty in building up expectations. As you know, we gain a lot of pleasure from the frustration or reward of our expectations of what the music will do next. If we encounter a new type of music from a different culture, then we start off finding it rather difficult to deal with. After listening to the new genre for several hours spread over several days or weeks, we start to “get it.” Once we have a handle

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