
Why Musicians Need Philosophy - tintinnabula
http://www.futuresymphony.org/why-musicians-need-philosophy/
======
jdietrich
I think the writer fundamentally misunderstands Schoenberg's approach, and the
approach of many avant-garde composers.

Schoenberg was engaged in an experiment. His polemic was not an absolute
statement on the future of music, but a hypothesis. It is a framework for
experimentation, like the Dogme 95 movement in film. The point of an artistic
manifesto is to push a particular idea to an extreme and see what happens.

To quote Vi Hart: "It's a tool for breaking free of old musical habits ... to
get your brain to stop following the same, well-worn neural pathways and think
something you haven't thought before."

Schoenberg's legacy wasn't a generation of musicians who dogmatically stuck to
serialist principles, but a generation who had a deep intuition about the
limits of tonality. Eisler studied under Schoenberg, combining serialist ideas
with jazz and folk music. He created some of the most remarkable and powerful
music of the 20th century.

The work of the classical avant garde fed into jazz in a profound way. George
Russell's _Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation_ was integral to
some of the most important jazz works of the post-bop period. Most notably,
that includes Miles Davis' _Kind of Blue_ , by far the most popular and
accessible jazz album of all time.

Music is a conversation played out over centuries, a back-and-forth of ideas.
Sometimes a conversation needs polite consensus, sometimes it needs daring new
ideas, sometimes it needs someone to say "this is all bollocks".

Music needs people like Schoenberg, just as software needs people like RMS.
The progress of culture depends on the grand pronouncements of obsessive
lunatics.

~~~
Joeboy
> Music needs people like Schoenberg, just as software needs people like RMS.
> The progress of culture depends on the grand pronouncements of obsessive
> lunatics.

Maybe culture also needs people like Roger Scruton, for the same kind of
reason.

------
jasode
This essay is written in a stuffy academic style so the author's main idea can
get lost in his sea of words. Here's my attempt to understand it:

First the title,

    
    
      "Why Musicians Need Philosophy" 
    

can be mentally rewritten as

    
    
      "Why Musicians Need [An Aesthetic] Philosophy [to understand and counteract the Modernist Philosophy]"
    

Essentially, he's saying that music that is created from emphasizing the
"meta" aspect (e.g. modernism or abstraction) rather than composing aural
landscapes that please the ear is a form of _second rate philosophy_.

To support his position, he's claiming that something like the diatonic scales
with its divisions is deeply rooted in humanity and not purely arbitrary
culture. One can create music that works with this, or one can go "meta" and
deliberately avoid it (e.g. atonal for ambiguity's sake). John Cage's
"4'33"[1] seems to be the common go-to example of meta music.

This same type of "meta" philosophy argument can be applied to art and
literature. Art that "obviously" pleases the eye (such as Michelangelo and da
Vinci) isn't all there is to art. The artists can "break the 4th wall" (aka
"meta") and push the boundaries of abstractions. The art can draw attention to
its medium and materials or try to ignore it. An artist can put a rectangle on
the wall with a layer of silver particles covered by a sheet of glass and
insist this is _art_. You as the viewer just see "a ordinary mirror". The
artist (and his high-brow allies) then explains that you don't "get it"
because there's more to the "reflection". You can see your face in an infinity
of Mona Lisas etc. You as a viewer should not be constrained by a "canvas" or
"pigments". Other examples might be a plain white canvas with a single dot in
the middle. Or it could be a painted line -- and it happens to sell for $44
million[2]. The famous urinal[3] is another piece that invites analysis and
commentary. Is all of this "art"? Or "philosophy" packaged as art? You decide.

Discussing avante garde art/music/literature can get really weird and you
don't know if people are trolling each other with Poe's Law.[4]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3)

[2][http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-
white-l...](http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-white-line-
sells-for-nearly-44-million-4-pictures/)

[3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\))

[4][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

------
Smaug123
Reading this, I become sure that I lack some vital pieces of background. I'm
an adequate musician, and I know a little philosophy, but very nearly every
sentence of this piece seems to assume an awful lot of knowledge. (It would
seem it's not aimed at people like me.) Does anyone know of a source which
explains this background?

For example:

> Very few composers have philosophical gifts, and fewer still attempt to
> justify their music in philosophical terms – the great exception being
> Wagner, who, despite his vast literary output, always allowed his
> instinctive musicianship to prevail when it conflicted with his
> philosophical theories.

How did Wagner justify his music in philosophical terms? Why did he even feel
the need to justify it? What would such a justification look like? What would
a _competent_ justification look like? How can I identify a composer who has
philosophical gifts?

> But it is precisely the absence of philosophical reflection that has led to
> the invasion of the musical arena by half-baked ideas.

What half-baked ideas? For me, this also wants a [citation needed]. Has the
musical arena been invaded by half-baked ideas? By what mechanism did
philosophical reflection keep out those ideas in years past?

I could go on like this through the entire piece: I lack the training to
understand it, and I suspect most people on HN do too.

~~~
heja2009
> How did Wagner justify his music in philosophical terms? Why did he even
> feel the need to justify it? What would such a justification look like? What
> would a competent justification look like? How can I identify a composer who
> has philosophical gifts?

Wagner (and most other composers) were highly influenced by their contemporary
philosophy. The wikipedia article lists a lot of this and Wagner is a very
good example for this as he had rather intense and highly influential
conversations with philosophers: many books have been written about Wagner and
Nietsche's relationship alone. Wagner also changed his ideas (and consequently
his music) over time, most prominently embracing first germanic mythology and
later christianity.

About the "competence" and "half-bakedness" of musical theories held by
composers over the time you can probably entertain many prolonged spirited
conversations. Personally - having read some classical and pre-classical aera
musical theory books - I think you can find excellence and mediocracy
distributed rather equally over the centuries.

And yes, this piece seems to expect the reader to know a bit about music
history, especially that of musical theory.

------
gp7
Very pleased to see Roger Scruton is answering the same question a lecturer of
mine once posed as a curveball essay question. I'm not convinced he answers it
very well though, it sounds more like "Why musicians need 19th century
philosophy," or perhaps, "Why musicians need to return to the past."

To HN: what do you think Harman's object oriented ontology has to offer
composers and performers of classical music? Or what about speculative
realism? Or effective altruism?

------
pjdorrell
"the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music"

Is there an objective scientific definition of the word "banal" as applied to
music?

What I read is the author saying: "Other people like pop music, but I don't".

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slash213
In short: drone music is basically communism. Got it.

------
Tar90
This is the most ignorant piece I've ever read in this site. Ignorant about
music, ignorant about philosophy and even architecture gets its fair share of
ignorance. His comments about the music of the past are completely off ("the
repertory was neither controversial nor specially challenging"), as are those
about the present music (" our music has either floated into the modernist
stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth
by the repetitious mechanisms of pop.")

This crap is pedantic second rate "family values" conservatism disguised as a
piece on music and philosophy.

~~~
dang
You may be right, but this comment doesn't help the reader understand why, and
the indignation is static in the channel. It would be better to edit that out,
then add in specific information about why each of those things is wrong. Then
we all learn something.

