Roger Scruton sings the praises of the musical avant-garde

DAVID says:

It’s true that the people who make the decisions as to how and where money is allocated often have poor musical knowledge and judgment — if any at all, indeed. This whole debate is ultimately about what’s fashionable and socially acceptable, which is unfortunately how subsidies are decided and where money often goes. There was a time not too long ago when writing an octave would have been considered anathema in the music world, luckily we have moved on from that. Scruton makes the point that even when composers wanted to be innovative, they still remained indebted to tonality, as in Schoenberg’s expression “floating tonality” which he quotes. The point being that music can still be tonal, or rather contain what one might call tonal “centers” or references, without being based on one main key. The modern belief that tradition can be jettisoned once and for all (Descartes in philosophy, Schoenberg in music with serialism) has proven rather naive, for we are always indebted in tradition, whether we are aware of it or not, and perhaps especially more so when we are not aware of it, for tradition is so imbedded within our being that it takes literally work to bring it to awareness. The human ear, or shall we say at the very least the western ear, is instinctively geared towards tonal references. This is why even people without any musical knowledge whatsoever can immediately detect when something is out of tune and simply “doesn’t fit.” This was one of the seminal points made by Jerome Ducros in his famous lecture on atonality at the Collège de France, which drew the ire of many in the Parisian musical world at the time, perhaps because they knew too well he was making a perfectly valid point. There is a reason why most people cannot listen to and genuinely enjoy, at least for a very long time, to a piece such as Le Marteau Sans Maître, whereas they come time and again to a Beethoven or a Mahler symphony, or even to some of Pink Floyd’s masterful albums: that’s because these works are intelligible, whereas much of contemporary music does not provide such intelligibility and becomes quickly frustrating, as little meaning can be derived from it. It can not be “followed” — the equivalent would be reading a book with unintelligible sentences, one would quickly put it down. It has always struck me that the abandonment of tonality still wanted to retain the old 12-tone equal temperament — in other words the very building block of tonality, where some tones attract others while others repel each other, and where tensions call for resolutions. Shouldn’t a truly new musical language have abandoned such temperament and resorted to the finest variations in pitch, such as quarter-tone and possibly even smaller? Well, we actually have had such works and know how they sound and know how much satisfaction we can derive from them. Atonal music, especially when wholly deprived of any tonal references, just doesn’t work, which is perhaps why we have witnessed such a remarkable recrudescence of tonality in the past 20 years or so. There is a perfectly valid reason why a Handel aria immediately speaks to most people, whereas their attention struggles to be sustained while listening to much of the music paradoxically labeled “contemporary,” as it really has failed to speak to its contemporaries outside the the insular world of fashionable musical outings.

Lauren Lynley says:

I am a fan of Scuton’s philosophy of beauty and music, not his politics (especially not his lust of blood sport). I do detest atonal and 12-tone music though. Much of the so-called Avant Garde seems a painfully self-conscious assault on beauty, kindness, and basic decency. As modern life is filled with ugliness and violence, I fail to see the value in adding yet more to the mix.