Also, I'm Not That Fond of Schoenberg
So I've been keeping up with this 20th-century music theory course I set out to audit, and it's driving me crazy. The professor (though incredibly nice) is very much an old school pitch-class-set-theory guy, so there's been a lot of Schoenberg and Webern and reducing jagged little melodies into strings of single-digit numbers.
Instead of paying attention to this, I've spent a lot of classroom time trying to find the simplest possible explanation of why set theory doesn't work right. I don't think it works right, and if that's true, then there must be an identifiable reason why.
Fortunately, studying set theory usually doesn't require actually listening to music, so you can think pretty clearly during class time.
(Note, by the way, that musical set theory has nothing in common with mathematical set theory. Yes, it's sad but true, modern mathematicians sometimes found it necessary to justify their aesthetic system by cloaking it in pseudo-musical nomenclature.)
I've more or less settled on the following. Any other music wonks, let me know if I'm making sense.
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Set theory assumes that musical structure can be built on intervallic cells. This, in turn, assumes -- falsely -- that intervals have a consistent identity or meaning outside of their immediate context.
The way I see it: Music works by constantly moving between tension and release. Tonal musical analysis gets at this, because tonal music sets up tension and release with functional harmony: dissonances resolve into consonances, and remote keys navigate back to the tonal center.
Set theory does not get at tension and release, because you're looking at intervallic cells out of musical context. You're not analyzing any given melodic line or a harmony to determine whether it's relatively consonant or dissonant, whether it represents a stopping point or invites a following passage. You're just tabulating the intervals in it, which may or may not be recognizable when you hear the passage.
I think at some point with severely atonal music, you need to just say, "OK, this piece stays pretty dissonant throughout," admit that the specific harmonic content often isn't telling you much else, and hone in on what's really generating the tension & release that moves the music forward. (Melodic gesture, voice texture, etc.) And with less severely atonal music, look for complex or fleeting tonal centers and tease out how they work.
Take, even, rigorous 12-tone music: no one actually claims that you can follow a row as it's being manipulated through a piece of music. Well, figure out what you are hearing, and then figure out why it sounds that way.
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I'm really curious how widely this brand of set theory is taught; I only encountered it briefly as an undergrad, and I would have thought it mostly dissipated from the universities as severe atonal music lost its "all that" status in the 1980s.
Most of the students in the class, meanwhile, just need the course as a requirement for the music major, so they're obviously in "persevering" mode. There seem to be a small number of theory geeks who are more engaged with it.
Instead of paying attention to this, I've spent a lot of classroom time trying to find the simplest possible explanation of why set theory doesn't work right. I don't think it works right, and if that's true, then there must be an identifiable reason why.
Fortunately, studying set theory usually doesn't require actually listening to music, so you can think pretty clearly during class time.
(Note, by the way, that musical set theory has nothing in common with mathematical set theory. Yes, it's sad but true, modern mathematicians sometimes found it necessary to justify their aesthetic system by cloaking it in pseudo-musical nomenclature.)
I've more or less settled on the following. Any other music wonks, let me know if I'm making sense.
-----
Set theory assumes that musical structure can be built on intervallic cells. This, in turn, assumes -- falsely -- that intervals have a consistent identity or meaning outside of their immediate context.
The way I see it: Music works by constantly moving between tension and release. Tonal musical analysis gets at this, because tonal music sets up tension and release with functional harmony: dissonances resolve into consonances, and remote keys navigate back to the tonal center.
Set theory does not get at tension and release, because you're looking at intervallic cells out of musical context. You're not analyzing any given melodic line or a harmony to determine whether it's relatively consonant or dissonant, whether it represents a stopping point or invites a following passage. You're just tabulating the intervals in it, which may or may not be recognizable when you hear the passage.
I think at some point with severely atonal music, you need to just say, "OK, this piece stays pretty dissonant throughout," admit that the specific harmonic content often isn't telling you much else, and hone in on what's really generating the tension & release that moves the music forward. (Melodic gesture, voice texture, etc.) And with less severely atonal music, look for complex or fleeting tonal centers and tease out how they work.
Take, even, rigorous 12-tone music: no one actually claims that you can follow a row as it's being manipulated through a piece of music. Well, figure out what you are hearing, and then figure out why it sounds that way.
--------
I'm really curious how widely this brand of set theory is taught; I only encountered it briefly as an undergrad, and I would have thought it mostly dissipated from the universities as severe atonal music lost its "all that" status in the 1980s.
Most of the students in the class, meanwhile, just need the course as a requirement for the music major, so they're obviously in "persevering" mode. There seem to be a small number of theory geeks who are more engaged with it.
1 Comments:
I think your interpretation is pretty valid. In my two-or-three 20th century music classes, set theory was touched on in a couple of contexts, but never really thoroughly taught or proposed as a universally useful tool. Reference was made in one of them to someone-or-other's attempt to analyze some number of Beethoven's compositions with set theory, but in very much a "it didn't really turn out to be very useful" kind of way.
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