

Vi Hart on Stravinsky's Atonal Compositions [video] - ColinWright
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/09/vi-hart-explains-stravinsky/

======
mrbrowning
So, I want to preface my comment by saying that I think this video is really
well-made and entertaining, and that it's a decent attempt at making serialism
accessible to a wider audience than it's traditionally had.

 _That said_ , it's littered with inaccuracies that I don't think we would
tolerate if this were one of Vi Hart's math videos. Most egregiously, I think,
is that she wrongly ascribes some of Schoenberg's dogma to Stravinsky:
Stravinsky never had much to say about the desirability of conditioning
children to understand dodecaphonic music intuitively (Schoenberg may not have
either -- if I had my copy of _Strunk 's Source Readings in Music History_ on
me right now I could verify this, but if I remember correctly it was either
Webern or an unrelated third party who promulgated this particular vision of
the ascendancy of avant garde music), nor was he particularly committed to
using all twelve tones in his tone rows -- _Agon_ , one of his most famous
serialist works, employs a seventeen-tone row at one point [1]. Early on in
the video, she selects a tone row at random and sort of dismissively asserts
that no one would be able to tell the difference anyway. This is frustrating,
because masters like Schoenberg did in fact order their rows to ensure not
only structural but _sonic_ coherence, using techniques such as hexachordal
combinatoriality [2]. Now, that's not to say that these considerations are
audible to most listeners -- one of serialism's greatest failings, in my
opinion, is that much of its content is only discoverable on paper even by
highly trained musicians -- but it's certainly audible to some, and it's worth
noting that this runs counter to her assertion that musical lines don't have
meaning until they're embedded in a harmonic context: it's not even true with
serialism as practiced! It's certainly the case that many melodic lines can
make sense in multiple harmonic contexts, but the idea that melodies imply
their supporting harmony has been a foundational concept in Western music
since at least the Baroque, and to counter otherwise is absurd -- otherwise we
would be unable to comprehend the harmonic movements of e.g. a solo flute
piece. This gets at my major frustration with this presentation, which is that
to present serialism as merely a fun and basically arbitrary means of
constraining your artistic output is deeply hostile to the reasons for why the
technique was developed and the music that people made with it. Maybe you're
rolling your eyes at this level of nitpickery, but the fact is that it's
reasonable to expect someone who's posturing as an educator to have a better
handle on the source material than I see here.

I've gotten flak from people for pointing out problems with her videos on
music before, and I wonder if it's just because we don't have enough respect
for music as a discipline to want to hear it when someone gets things wrong.
For that reason I want to reiterate that this my criticism here isn't hostile,
it's not meant as a takedown, but as someone with stakes in the material being
presented I don't want to see it being presented inaccurately.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon_(ballet)#Music](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon_\(ballet\)#Music)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatoriality#Hexachordal_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatoriality#Hexachordal_combinatoriality)

~~~
Luc
We now await the comment from an even more pedantic professor of music picking
the details of _your_ comment apart.

(Instead of criticizing, you could have framed this as interesting elucidation
and additional info instead, and let people make up their own mind)

~~~
stephencanon
His comment _was_ an interesting elucidation. It offers both meaningful
criticism and valuable historical context.

~~~
Luc
And I'm telling you, the criticism is unwarranted. Anyone who's ever attempted
to explain a deep and complex subject as succinctly as possible knows that
corners need to be cut. But you can be certain that when you do this, someone
will want to show off their expert knowledge by finding nits to pick.

------
msluyter
Tangential:

Back when I was studying music, I took a class by the brilliant David Noon
called "Stravinsky," on... Stravinsky. Dr. Noon presented a very early work of
Stravinsky's (when he was in his early 20's, I believe) and noted that it was
incredibly unpromising -- amateurish, banal. Note, 20 is really _old_ by
typical composer prodigy standards, so it's somewhat amazing that within a
decade or so, Stravinsky went on to write masterpieces like The Firebird,
Petrushka, and Rite of Spring.

Another fascinating thing about Stravinsky is that he re-invented himself
several times, moving from his brilliant early Rimsy-Korsakoff like style to
spare neo-classicism, and then on to atonality. As someone who's moved from
music to software development, I find that inspiring.

I mostly mention this to encourage those who may have started down their paths
in life atypically late.

------
mkl
Vi Hart is fantastic; I recommend watching all her videos [1] (though skip the
very early music-only ones if that's not your thing). Particularly good are
the hexaflexagon ones [2] and the plant spiral ones [3].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0)

~~~
leephillips
She deserves the Nobel Prize of the internet. Her Pythagoras video[0] is one
of my favorites.

I was awestruck at the end of this one, after seeing the musical shapes. A
well-spent 30 minutes.

I would only disagree with her listing of Stravinsky as an "atonal" composer.
Although he did mess with 12-tone composition a bit very late in his career,
he is not usually thought of this way, as he very much dealt with tonality in
the vast majority of his work.

[0][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1E7I7_r3Cw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1E7I7_r3Cw)

~~~
stephencanon
Even Stravinsky's serial compositions aren’t so much atonal as they are post-
tonal. There are relatively few composers whose work can be genuinely called
“atonal”.

------
JonnieCache
For those of you who find Schoenberg's work interesting but ultimately
unlistenable, I suggest checking out some Takemitsu. He uses a lot of similar
ideas, but you don't get the same feeling of contempt for the concept of music
that one sometimes gets listening to hardcore serialism. (I know that's not at
all how schoenberg thought but it's hard to avoid feeling like that on
occasion.)

 _Rain Tree Sketch_ is a good place to start:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD01g6q3zPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD01g6q3zPo)

------
leephillips
Since this superb video mentions both Stravinsky and John Cage, I think it
would be in order to bring up what the former said when the latter's "Silence"
piece was described to him. There are many versions of the story; my favorite
has Stravinsky replying something like "I look forward to hearing works of
major length by this composer."

~~~
aaimnr
Actually the name is not Silence but 4' 33" and it's important, because the
piece is not really about a silence, but about a various random sounds you
start hearing in the audience when an artist is not playing.

~~~
mdellabitta
True, "Silence" is actually a book: [http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Lectures-
Writings-Anniversary-...](http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Lectures-Writings-
Anniversary-
Edition/dp/0819571768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373400605&sr=8-1&keywords=john+cage+silence)

------
ximeng
"Silence won't be in the public domain until 2062" \- hah

~~~
eccp
In the meantime there's a wonderful version of John Cage's "4:33" here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAbXwr3qkg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAbXwr3qkg)

~~~
BoppreH
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

~~~
jamesbritt
Here's another:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA)

But keep quiet about it.

A video that simply showed a timer counting down four minutes and 33 seconds
would be even better.

Live performance on every viewing.

~~~
vacri
4'33" isn't "silence", it's "sounds of an orchestra playing nothing". It's
supposed to be the sounds of pages turning, people shuffling for comfort, so
on and so forth. A countdown clock would not be an appropriate replica.

~~~
gohrt
Whoosh?

Watching a blank video has a similar effect: You start to hear the ambient
sounds... traffic outside the window, the ticking clock in the corner, the
60Hz hum of your electronics, the creaking as you rock in your chair, air
whooshing through the conditioner vent...

~~~
sanoli
4'33 is okay as an experiment, sort of like an unexpected meditation/awareness
of the present class to an unsuspecting audience (for those hearing it for the
first time). Not much beyond that, though.

------
tshadwell
This is the third time I've seen brainpickings.org: would it not have sufficed
to link directly to the video?

------
graycat
I watched the whole video.

She has very pretty hands! To play all that atonal music with such facility,
she is at least really good with piano. That she can sing that atonal music so
well is astounding. And her drawing is amazing: The _art_ she gets in her
drawing, e.g., the little cup with legs, is surprisingly good; it looks like
she could effortlessly be a famous cartoonist.

Beyond her talents and skills, her knowledge of music is amazing.

But, then, as far as I can tell about what she was intending to say about
music, heavily I don't believe her. It appears to me that somewhere, at home,
at Stony Brook, somewhere, she got a view of music that throws out the baby
and drinks the bathwater. From what I can understand about what she is saying,
I believe that she is missing most of what is really important in music. She
seems to have some formality overwhelming reality.

It appeared that one of her main points was that music before atonality was
somehow _merely tonal_ and, thus, by 1900 or so played out, over with, and
needed a _new direction_ , e.g., atonality. I don't believe that.

For an analogy, from all I can tell, what she is saying is that everything
that can be said in the English language has already been said so that, to say
anything new, we need another language. Next, the _content_ is not really in
what is said anyway but just in what the reader reads into what is said. So,
it's enough just to say random things. So, that we don't confuse with English,
we will say the random things in a new, undefined language of gibberish no one
has seen before.

Nonsense. We are not anywhere near the limits of what can be said in English.
The bottleneck is having something to say, not the language to use to say it.

Well, there's a _language_ in Western music. Here is a little of it: Pick two
keys on a piano that are right next to each other; it may be that both keys
are white or one is black and the other is white, but in any case they are
next to each other. Then to a good approximation the fundamental frequency of
the key on the right will be the twelfth root of 2 times the fundamental
frequency of the key on the left. That frequency ratio is a _semi-tone_. A
frequency ratio of the sixth root of 2, that is, two semi-tones, is a _whole
tone_. If start on a note and go up tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, tone, tone,
semi-tone, then have gone up in frequency by a factor of 2 (interval of an
_octave_ ) and have played the notes of the _major scale_ of the note you
started on and ended on -- that note is called the _tonic_ of that scale. You
will be playing the notes of the _major key_ of that tonic.

Of course for historical reasons, nearly all those frequency ratios are
surprisingly well approximated by _perfect tuning_ via ratios of small whole
numbers. In particular, as at Google,

    
    
         2**(7/12) = 1.49830707688
    

which is close to 3/2 which is 7 semi-tones, called a _perfect fifth_ , and
how the main string instruments -- violin, viola, cello -- in an orchestra are
tuned.

If you start on the note C and go up the major scale, then you will play on
only the white keys and will be playing in the key of C major.

If you want to play some simple music, then pick a note as the tonic, start on
that note, play the other notes in the major scale of that tonic but avoiding
the tonic, but, when want to end, return to the tonic. That's done so often in
Western music that everyone will quickly detect which note is the tonic (or
one step more advanced, which notes are candidates for the tonic) and notice
that when you return to the tonic the music has finished something and maybe
just ended. All that is part of the _language_ of Western music. And there's
much more such language that we have all _learned_ if only by association from
lots of exposure.

But atonality largely discards that language. Then, someone who knows only
English or is writing for people who know only English, discarding English
essentially stops communications, and that's why it's super tough to hear any
_communication_ in atonal music. Yes, the music is _new and different_ but so
would be dropping a pile of brittle dishes on the floor, and in both cases the
sound is _new_ only because before everyone was smart enough to avoid making
such a sound.

For music, yes, it mostly doesn't mean anything definite, specific, and
unambiguous literally. Mostly. But, of course, in the Sibelius _Finlandia_ or
the R. Strauss _Ein Heldenleben_ it is fairly unambiguous what is being said,
including the machine gun fire in _Finlandia_ and the personality of the girl
in _Ein Heldenleben_.

For something still with _meaning_ but more ambiguous, in the D major section
of the Bach _Chaconne_ for solo violin, there is a lot of use of repeated
notes, especially A and D, three notes or four notes, and finally some
repeated chords.

But what to make of the repetition? One approach is to regard them as
_insistent_ , increasingly so during the section, underlining the short
passages between the repeated notes, passages that are similar but with some
variation. It could be music from impassioned speaking, saying much the same
thing over and over, more and more strongly, with the repeated notes/chords
between as insistent emphasis.

At one point, the music suddenly changes, as if exhausted from the passion,
and plays just some more consonant major thirds (D and F#, that is, an
interval of two whole tones) with some short descending passages. Then the
drama increases again with some repeated chords to the climax of the piece
before a D minor section that starts with a confused _catharsis_.

So, for an _interpretation_ , the music is from something intense going on,
building up, becoming insistent, somehow trying to get some _resolution_ one
way or another, finally, with a big effort, doing so, and then receding to a
catharsis.

One view is that the music is screaming out to the heavens about the intensity
of the human spirit. Some might guess, but I don't see a good fit, is that the
music was a representation of Bach working to add one more to his family.
Either way, it's passionate music; the closest of anything else I know of is
the _Chaconne_ of Vitali, and it is quite different. No, I don't find
Stravinsky's _Le sacre du printemps_ close.

There is an old story that composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco regarded the Bach
_Chaconne_ as the "greatest piece of music ever written". I can see many
issues in interpretation in that music, but I see nothing that suggests that
the level of art in the music was constrained by tonality.

Net, I don't see that tonal music, even the quite old version of it Bach used,
either inhibited or exhausted new musical expression.

To understand better, we need to back up from just keys, tonality, chord
progressions, etc. and notice that heavily music is _art_ as in the classic
definition _the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion_.
So, the listener gets a _vicarious emotional experience_ or sometimes in
particular something that _speaks to part of their life_ , that is, confirms
that others have faced the same things, or at least similar emotions, thus,
confirming, possibly comfortingly, for the listener that they are not alone.

When Rostropovich first went to Berlin to play with von Karajan, for just what
was _meant_ in how Rostropovich started the second movement of the Dvorák
concerto I don't know, but he, von Karajan, and several soloists in the
orchestra seemed to have the same _musical communications_ in mind, and that
communication _speaks_ effectively and directly to me about some parts of my
life. So, Rostropovich achieved an effective communication in a _universal_
language.

With this definition of art and with the essentially endless range of human
experience, emotion, there is an endless range of music to communicate,
interpret, new music, not written yet, including with tonality the same as
used by any of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Chopin, Mendelssohn,
Puccini, ..., Wagner, J. Strauss, R. Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and
more. Great, new music is no more limited by tonality than new information is
limited by English; being atonal is no help for good, new art in music but,
like replacing English with gibberish, a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

There is a lot of quite good art available mostly in just performance, with
very old tonality; can get plenty of communication, interpretation of human
experience, emotion, awash in passion, pathos, poignancy, sympathy, empathy,
identification, etc.

E.g., there is the Kelly Pickler _I Wonder_ :

    
    
         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9mvkxE5Ww
    

That with her hair, face, and figure, with the right hair stylist and dress
selection, in places she is able to look a lot like Marilyn Monroe is nearly
irrelevant. Instead, this music is a heart rending portrayal of a pretty,
young woman, who still regards herself as a "little girl", suffering from
feeling neglected by her mother. It's endearing. Standard emotional reactions
include sympathy, empathy. Men, in particular, are supposed to feel
protective, but some will see weakness and dependency and sense an opportunity
for an easy _score_. And the music works, well. There is no end to such human
experience, emotion to be interpreted, communicated.

That Kelly Pickler art really is new: Sure, the tonality is old, really old,
and the harmony may be just a cliche; in tonality we're certainly not
listening to Wagner's "Prelude" to _Tristan und Isolde_ ; still, I assure you
from my many stacks of recorded music from vinyl to CDs and the Internet, from
Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff to the present, as art that Pickler video is new
and at least good.

So, even recent popular music, with no pretensions at _serious_ music, and
using old tonalities and cliche harmonies, can still be good as art. Net, it's
still quite possible, even in Nashville popular music, to do good art with old
tonalities.

The main point is the art; tonality is not a limitation; and atonality is no
help to better art.

------
mlopes
Vi from Altitude? :P

------
rfnslyr
So this website does what exactly? Summarizes things? I'm discarding it as
blog spam. Link the actual video not an article with a loose description
begging for page views based on somebody elses content, and then they ask you
to donate at the bottom of the page.

~~~
jamesbritt
The actual Youtube page was previously posted
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982647))
but got no traction.

But re-posting via some blogspam site shouldn't be encouraged.

~~~
ColinWright
Indeed - I hadn't seen that, and it was only after the complaint was made that
I found the original. And again, _mea culpa_ \- I apologise.

That said, it was this link that turned up in my feed, and when I thought the
HN crowd might like it I clicked the bookmarklet, so submitting it. The
blogspam aspect was not intentional.

~~~
jamesbritt
I'm quite glad when good links get a second chance, whomever ends up posting
it. Shame there's not a proper way to revitalize content that, for whatever
reason, fails to get attention.

No doubt that's a slippery slope, though.

