# A Recent , Unusual, Highly Statistical Analysis of the "Evolution" of Classical Music



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

*A Recent , Unusual, Highly Statistical Analysis of the "Evolution" of Classical Music*

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486899/#!po=4.71698

I will offer no summary or comment on the linked paper, other than it purports, via detailed analysis, to confirm what most musicologists and music history books believe are/were the major innovators in the development of western classical music.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Taruskin and Gibbs:

_"many people have believed that the history of music has a purpose and that the primary obligation of musicians is not to meet the needs of their immediate audience, but, rather, to help fulfill that purpose-namely, the furthering of the evolutionary progress of the art. This means that one is morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history, an idea that has been one of the most powerful motivating forces and one of the most demanding criteria of value in the history of music. (…). With this development came the related views that the future of the arts was visible to a select few and that the opinion of others did not matter."_

What an astonishing claim.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

(Deleted, posted in wrong thread, sorry)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

janxharris said:


> Taruskin and Gibbs:
> 
> _"many people have believed that the history of music has a purpose and that the primary obligation of musicians is not to meet the needs of their immediate audience, but, rather, to help fulfill that purpose-namely, the furthering of the evolutionary progress of the art. This means that one is morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history, an idea that has been one of the most powerful motivating forces and one of the most demanding criteria of value in the history of music. (…). With this development came the related views that the future of the arts was visible to a select few and that the opinion of others did not matter."_
> 
> What an astonishing claim.


You understand that Taruskin and Gibbs aren't endorsing this view, right? What do you find astonishing about this? It was a pretty standard view of many composers and academics in the 20thc.


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## Room2201974 (Jan 23, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> You understand that Taruskin and Gibbs aren't endorsing this view, right? What do you find astonishing about this? It was a pretty standard view of many composers and academics in the 20thc.


Wow, where was I when this happened? Over 40 years of hanging out with composers and academics and never once did anything resembling the quotation come up. "Morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history"????? Excuse me, that's balderdash.

Lenny Haise - "Oh, there he goes again. Up to his room to write that big hit composition, _Morally Bound To Serve The Impersonal Aims Of History_."


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Here is Boulez's infamous take on the historical necessity of 12-tone music: "I, in turn, assert that any musician who has not experienced--I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced--the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch." So yes, a full century after Brendel, some composers were still dutifully following the "needs" of history.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Eschbeg said:


> Here is Boulez's infamous take on the historical necessity of 12-tone music: *"I, in turn, assert that any musician who has not experienced--I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced--the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch."* So yes, a full century after Brendel, some composers were still dutifully following the "needs" of history.


That was Boulez speaking as late as 1952, the same year Cage brought out his 4'33." One might view that piece of post-music either as expressing an alternate view of musical evolution and the "needs of the epoch," or as a rejection of the whole idea - or both at once. A year earlier, Robert Rauschenberg had produced his "White Paintings" series, in which canvases were covered uniformly with white house paint. Such ideas had been anticipated early in the century (no doubt with the "needs" of the future in mind). But in any case, by the 1950s the morally obligatory imperatives of history had seemingly brought evolution to a climax: at last we could sit listening raptly to totally serialized music and stare fixedly at empty canvases, and witness the naked essence of art unencumbered by such outmoded utilitarian purposes as the representation of nature, the expression of society's and the individual's values, and the giving of pleasure.

Since then, outmoded utilitarian purposes have been creeping back into the arts, though timidly and erratically. Painters (the "neorealists") began reintroducing recognizable subject matter and using depth perspective in violation of the Platonically perfect flatness of the picture plane, and composers, having learned how to subjugate every particle of music to the epoch's Rule of Twelve, set aside their calculations and dared again simply to write what sounded good. Even Pierre, once the needs of his epoch had been satisfied, decided that conducting obsolete music was a respectable way to spend his time, and that Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler were fun guys to hang out with.

Are we finished with worrying about the imperatives of evolution? Are there still things that artists are supposed to do or avoid doing? Are we in the era of postmodernism, when anything goes as long as it's ironic, or are we into post-postmodernism, whatever that may be?


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> by the 1950s the morally obligatory imperatives of history had seemingly brought evolution to a climax: at last we could sit listening raptly to totally serialized music and stare fixedly at empty canvases, and witness the naked essence of art unencumbered by such outmoded utilitarian purposes as the representation of nature, the expression of society's and the individual's values, and the giving of pleasure.


Not that it should surprise us that the Romantic/Hegelian "needs of history" should resurface in 1950s modernism. With the possible exception of the early stages of Medieval plainchant, at no other prior time in history was the urgency to compose in a specific style so inversely proportional to the exposure and appeal of that style among the general public. Especially with the academicization of modernism in the 1950s, there had to be some way to justify why institutional prestige should be bestowed upon a kind of music that in many cases explicitly shunned the uninitiated. Whose needs was this music meeting, if not the needs of an audience? The needs of history helped provide that justification. The epitome of this ideology, unsurprisingly, is Milton Babbitt's "Who Cares If You Listen?":

_Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing _[i.e. serialism]_. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live._

If, as Babbitt argues, the current state of musical development is to be found in serialism rather than in laymen's music, it follows that not all music counts as the music of the historical moment. Only one kind of music gets to be the voice of history.

Among the many, many ironies of this is that 1950s modernism is so often touted as a rejection of Romanticism, even though all of this ideology of historical obligation is so fundamentally Romantic in origin.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Eschbeg said:


> Here is Boulez's infamous take on the historical necessity of 12-tone music: "I, in turn, assert that any musician who has not experienced--I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced--the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch." So yes, a full century after Brendel, some composers were still dutifully following the "needs" of history.


Yep. Precisely what I had in mind. I ran into composition professors exactly that open minded. Triads were treated like cock roaches.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> You understand that Taruskin and Gibbs aren't endorsing this view, right? What do you find astonishing about this? It was a pretty standard view of many composers and academics in the 20thc.


I wasn't aware either way - only that 'many people' believe the assertion made. I think the phrase, 'one is morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history,' is awkward and perhaps ambiguous; I may have misunderstood. Certainly, any composer would ideally wish this or her work to have definition.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> Not that it should surprise us that the *Romantic/Hegelian "needs of history"* should resurface in 1950s modernism.


Could you expound on that a little please?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

This all reminds me of Marxist doctrine and the "historical inevitability" of the rise of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I suspect there is a connection.​


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

My jaw dropped when I read this part of the study:

"Uncovering what makes two composers similar, in a systematic way, has important economic implications for (1) the music information retrieval business; (2) a deeper insight into musical product definition and choice offered to music consumers and purchasers and (3) for our understanding of innovation in the creative industry."

Sounds like the author could be a secret agent for Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, or Muzak!


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## Guest (Jun 10, 2018)

Eschbeg said:


> If, as Babbitt argues, the current state of musical development is to be found in serialism rather than in laymen's music, it follows that not all music counts as the music of the historical moment. Only one kind of music gets to be the voice of history.


I think, given it was published in 1958, this ought to read as follows:



Eschbeg said:


> If, as Babbitt argued, the contemporary state of musical development was to be found in serialism rather than in laymen's music, it followed that not all music counted as the music of the historical moment. Only one kind of music got to be the voice of history.


The difference is that we're well past 1958---though not, perhaps, far enough past to know which are the compositions of that time or since that are the 'voice of history'.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Here we are coming at the diversification discussion from another angle. There was once an understanding that high art was for posterity, not for now. I'm not sure where it came from but it sounds like a Romantic idea. I am also not sure I am completely ready to let go of that idea! But it does seem quite alien to our current ways of valuing art. 

As for the main thrust of the paper, I suppose (like an early biologist setting out to study living organisms) the attempt is to develop a taxonomy of the variety of musics that populate our world. The nerd in me is interested enough to read the article when I get a chance.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Larkenfield said:


> My jaw dropped when I read this part of the study:
> 
> "Uncovering what makes two composers similar, in a systematic way, has important economic implications for (1) the music information retrieval business; (2) a deeper insight into musical product definition and choice offered to music consumers and purchasers and (3) for our understanding of innovation in the creative industry."
> 
> ...


There was nothing substantive said about "what makes two composers similar." All this study does is take the observations of musicologists, most of which are obvious and intuitive, and attempts to quantify them in a simplistic way. I don't see any added value in the quantification and sorting-It would be easier just to ask a musicologist-which leads me to think the author(s) isn't "a secret agent for," but someone trying to sell an algorithm to … (?)


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

janxharris said:


> Eschbeg said:
> 
> 
> > Not that it should surprise us that the Romantic/Hegelian "needs of history" should resurface in 1950s modernism.
> ...


Sure. I touched on it indirectly in a relatively recent post, so I'll freely cut and paste from it a little.

The gist of it is that according to Hegel, history unfolds according to a logical process and there is a specific direction in which history "wants" to progress. When applied to music, as it was most notably by Brendel, the 19th century historian mentioned in the above article, this means there are some composers who write the kind of music history demands, and there are other composers who don't.

As Taruskin and Gibb suggest, it would be difficult to overstate how thoroughly this ideology inheres in the culture of classical music, even today. The composers Brendel annointed as representatives of history were the so-called New German School of Wagner and Liszt (with Berlioz earning an honorable mention that he later tried to distance himself from), which is why those composers' stylistic features, both large-scale (music dramas, tone poems, and other genre-defying formal schemes) and small-scale (intense development of motivic material) became essential criteria for historically important music. On the flip side, it's why other music of the time that did not prioritize these features--grand opera, traditional opera, choral music, sacred music--declined in importance. One could argue that those genres have never fully recovered from this historical white-washing.

It is telling that when Schoenberg felt compelled to rescue Brahms's reputation from the New German School's attacks, he did so not by arguing that Brahms represented an equally valid approach to music, but by arguing (not without reason) that Brahms's music was every bit as motivically driven as Liszt's. This shows you how much Schoenberg accepted motivic development as the primary standard of musical importance. The title of Schoenberg's essay, "Brahms the Progressive," reveals exactly what the main issue was: not the quality of Brahms's music per se but whether Brahms could be considered a forward-looking composer, conscious of his historical obligation. And of course the real subtext of that essay was that Schoenberg and his followers were next in line as the annointed spokesmen of history, which is why the Second Viennese School were fond of describing their music as historically inevitable. Webern: "The death of tonality was not our fault! It forced itself overwhelmingly on us!" Even today, it is common for atonality and 12-tone music to be described as the "natural" outcome of the "inherent" tendencies of late Romantic music, as if those tendencies were not the result of deliberate, conscious actions on the part of a specific cohort of composers promoting a specific kind of music. (Which is not to say that atonal music shouldn't be thought of as the logical extreme of chromaticism. But any historical account that treats atonality as the primary narrative of music, with everything else being secondary episodes, has internalized the Hegelian, Romantic view of history. This explains why historians have had to rely on clumsy terms like "neo-Romantic" to describe tonal composers of the mid- and late-20th century, as if tonality had suddenly resurfaced out of nowhere after being presumed extinct.)


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> Triads were treated like cock roaches.


I just got this image in my head of Stockhausen angrily spraying Raid on some manuscript paper in front of him. The image is purely my invention and yet it makes Stockhausen even more endearing to me than he already is.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> Sure. I touched on it indirectly in a relatively recent post, so I'll freely cut and paste from it a little.
> 
> The gist of it is that according to Hegel, history unfolds according to a logical process and there is a specific direction in which history "wants" to progress. When applied to music, as it was most notably by Brendel, the 19th century historian mentioned in the above article, this means there are some composers who write the kind of music history demands, and there are other composers who don't.
> 
> ...


Thank you Eschbeg for this. There is much here to digest so it will take some mulling over.

Might we take issue with Webern's assertion that the 'death' of tonality was forced upon the Second Viennese School? Certainly tonality was _breaking down_ but that does not necessitate its death. Rather, a composer chooses to make a piece atonal I would say. I'm certainly not arguing that atonal music is necessarily without merit, but perhaps it is possible that much of the music in this style is only showing us _possibilities_. Stockhausen's _Gruppen_ remains extremely intriguing.

I do think that practically all composers desire that their compositions have definition, so serialism might be seen as a way of achieving this. Even so, much 20th century music not of the serial kind is distinctive.

Whether anyone can say that the 2nd V S (and those that followed them) were / are the anointed of this age is difficult to say in consideration of their seeming lack of acceptance in the concert hall. Perhaps, as I said, they have shown possibilities.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

> Eschbeg: "Even today, it is common for atonality and 12-tone music to be described as the "natural" outcome of the "inherent" tendencies of late Romantic music, as if those tendencies were not the result of deliberate, conscious actions on the part of a specific cohort of composers promoting a specific kind of music. (Which is not to say that atonal music shouldn't be thought of as the logical extreme of chromaticism. But any historical account that treats atonality as the primary narrative of music, with everything else being secondary episodes, has internalized the Hegelian, Romantic view of history. This explains why historians have had to rely on clumsy terms like "neo-Romantic" to describe tonal composers of the mid- and late-20th century, as if tonality had suddenly resurfaced out of nowhere after being presumed extinct.)"


Some may recall the long TC thread discussing Herbert Pauls' thesis. Pauls argued strongly that musical romanticism never went away with the advent of atonal/twelve-tone music in the minds of a large contingent of composers throughout the 20th century and certainly in the minds and ears of a very large audience of listeners. He asserts that the idea of the inevitable dominance of atonal/serial music is actually an artifact of selectively written musical history texts and agenda-driven historians, and offers a counternarrative based upon examining CD sales, the rise of small specialty CD labels, polling, and other data. Here's a link to Pauls' thesis (it actually is a thesis):

http://www.musicweb-international.com/books/Pauls_two_centuries_in_one.pdf


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

janxharris said:


> Thank you Eschbeg for this. There is much here to digest so it will take some mulling over.
> 
> Might we take issue with Webern's assertion that the 'death' of tonality was forced upon the Second Viennese School? *Certainly tonality was breaking down but that does not necessitate its death.* Rather, a composer chooses to make a piece atonal I would say. I'm certainly not arguing that atonal music is necessarily without merit, but perhaps it is possible that much of the music in this style is only showing us _possibilities_. Stockhausen's _Gruppen_ remains extremely intriguing.
> 
> ...


Accepting this bad metaphor at face value is a symptom of a bigger delusion. Tonality didn't break down or do anything else. By portraying the aesthetic choices of individuals as a quasi-natural and irresistible process, like erosion or entropy, one privileges certain choices as inevitable historical phenomena. The metaphor implies that the vitality and aesthetic potential of tonality were exhausted. In fact, the people who pushed this metaphor, had they been honest and less arrogant, would simply have declared that they themselves couldn't imagine new and interesting ways to use and extend tonality. Alas for them, the people who could now overshadow them in concert life and the standard repertoire.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

On tonality. Listen to the super chromaticism of Max Reger around the early part of the 20th century, concerts of his that Schoenberg used to attend, and it sounds inevitable to me that composers would have felt the need to go beyond the staleness of what Reger had done, a composer who was considered highly influential. Some of Reger's work meanders all over the place in chromatic tonality, and a radical venture, a radical departure into atonality, would seem like the next inevitable step-and whether one likes it or not, that's what happened with Schoenberg and others.

I doubt if anyone can come to terms with atonal without genuinely hearing just how far chromatic tonality had been pushed. The atonal world must have seemed like a breath of fresh air for new exploration, the inevitable next step, after chromatic tonality have been pushed so far in it's meandering-and Reger was one of the major forces who drove it to its ultimate point of no return at the time. Since then, the pendulum has obviously swung back in the direction of the tonal universe, but now includes both worlds. The break with totality, the radical break, was needed and it's been integrated into to the modern musical vocabulary, so a composer can be as refined as a Chopin nocturne or do a frightening soundtrack to Friday the 13th. If Reger had made the break himself, he might not be a virtually forgotten figure.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

janxharris said:


> Whether anyone can say that the 2nd V S (and those that followed them) were / are the anointed of this age is difficult to say in consideration of their seeming lack of acceptance in the concert hall.


Not coincidentally, the anointing of atonality as the primary narrative of 20th century music happened at roughly the same time that the repertory of the concert hall really began to diverge from the canon of works enshrined by history books. That's why it's not really possible to devise a comprehensive and unified narrative of 20th century music history: the music of the past 100 years or so has been moving along separate, parallel tracks. Sure, there are a handful of composers who have managed to secure a position in both the repertory and the canon: Sibelius, Stravinsky, Copland, and Bartok come to mind, and more recently maybe John Adams. But for the most part we've got Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Crumb, and Lindberg in the narrative of the canon, and Rachmaninoff, Britten, Barber, and Higdon in the narrative of the repertory. Anointing a "music of the age" can't be done unless we're very selective about which demographic gets to be the face of the age in the first place.

To be fair, any historical account has to choose some narrative if it is to be useful, and that narrative is necessarily going to privilege some things over others. That's simply how the writing of history works. I, for one, am not calling for a history of 20th century music that accounts for every work written by every composer in every style. But it would be nice to see histories of 20th century music that are a little more upfront and honest about their selectivity.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> Accepting this bad metaphor at face value is a symptom of a bigger delusion. Tonality didn't break down or do anything else. By portraying the aesthetic choices of individuals as a quasi-natural and irresistible process, like erosion or entropy, one privileges certain choices as inevitable historical phenomena. The metaphor implies that the vitality and aesthetic potential of tonality were exhausted. In fact, the people who pushed this metaphor, had they been honest and less arrogant, would simply have declared that they themselves couldn't imagine new and interesting ways to use and extend tonality. Alas for them, the people who could now overshadow them in concert life and the standard repertoire.


There was and is no acceptance on my part of tonality doing anything.

Strong words here EdwardBast regarding the atonalists. You seem pretty indignant. You don't see anything meritorious of this new music?


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> Not coincidentally, the anointing of atonality as the primary narrative of 20th century music


I'm not aware this has been established and accepted.



> happened at roughly the same time that the repertory of the concert hall really began to diverge from the canon of works enshrined by history books. That's why it's not really possible to devise a comprehensive and unified narrative of 20th century music history: the music of the past 100 years or so has been moving along separate, parallel tracks. Sure, there are a handful of composers who have managed to secure a position in both the repertory and the canon: Sibelius, Stravinsky, Copland, and Bartok come to mind, and more recently maybe John Adams. But for the most part we've got Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Crumb, and Lindberg in the narrative of the canon, and Rachmaninoff, Britten, Barber, and Higdon in the narrative of the repertory. *Anointing a "music of the age" can't be done unless we're very selective about which demographic gets to be the face of the age in the first place.*


Oh - I see, you object too.

Jennifer Higdon? really? I have heard bits and pieces but didn't know this regarding the repertory. US repertory?



> To be fair, any historical account has to choose some narrative if it is to be useful, and that narrative is necessarily going to privilege some things over others. That's simply how the writing of history works. I, for one, am not calling for a history of 20th century music that accounts for every work written by every composer in every style. But it would be nice to see histories of 20th century music that are a little more upfront and honest about their selectivity.


Ok.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

janxharris said:


> There was and is no acceptance on my part of tonality doing anything.
> 
> Strong words here EdwardBast regarding the atonalists. You seem pretty indignant. You don't see anything meritorious of this new music?


I didn't say anything about atonalists in general or anyone's music specifically. I talked about the intellectual arrogance of the people behind a bad metaphor. I like a good deal of music that has been called atonal.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> I didn't say anything about atonalists in general or anyone's music specifically. I talked about the intellectual arrogance of the people behind a bad metaphor. I like a good deal of music that has been called atonal.


But your :

_Alas for them, the people who could now overshadow *them* in concert life and the standard repertoire._

speaks of tonal music overshadowing atonal does it not?


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## Guest (Jun 11, 2018)

janxharris said:


> But your :
> 
> _Alas for them, the people who could now overshadow *them* in concert life and the standard repertoire._
> 
> speaks of tonal music overshadowing atonal does it not?


That's not my take on what Edward wrote. I still object to that sentence on syntactical grounds as it has no finite verb. And I'm also not sure whether the 'them' in the first clause is the same as the 'them' in the second, so I'm not clear what is meant at all.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Eschbeg said:


> Sure. I touched on it indirectly in a relatively recent post, so I'll freely cut and paste from it a little.
> 
> The gist of it is that according to Hegel, history unfolds according to a logical process and there is a specific direction in which history "wants" to progress. When applied to music, as it was most notably by Brendel, the 19th century historian mentioned in the above article, this means there are some composers who write the kind of music history demands, and there are other composers who don't.
> 
> ...


A useful and cogent summary of some very relevant history, here. Thanks.

What started happening towards the end of the 19th Century was that it became more and more difficult to choose the strand that would represent this historical "progress". This was because music was diversifying - a process that was always bound to accelerate as the choice of roots to grow your art from becomes wider, as well as the choice of path to take from these roots - and it quite surprising that it took so long for critics and composers to accept this. But is there really any choice but to accept it? Can anyone really be comfortable with saying that the 2nd Viennese School were the one and only historically inevitable next step and that, say, Bartok or Stravinsky were not? Or vice versa?

And we might also look at the idea of history as some sort of progress. If it is not progress towards an inevitable direction (with, perhaps, an inevitable end point?) then what is it progress towards? Is anything inevitable? Perhaps it is in the sense of it being being guided by algorithms. But this inevitability is very complex as art is not in a vacuum but interacts with all sorts of other processes (historical, sociological, psychological etc). All we can do, it seems, is observe and categorise.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

janxharris said:


> But your :
> 
> _Alas for them, the people who could now overshadow *them* in concert life and the standard repertoire._
> 
> speaks of tonal music overshadowing atonal does it not?


No, it acknowledges that the music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, et alia is performed more than that of Boulez, Babbitt and pals. Some people on TC don't think Prokofiev and Shostakovich are tonal composers.


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