The Paradox of Contemporary Music.

Common Aesthetics, trends, competitions, juries, physics and contradictions.
It’s not too difficult to see what these concepts have in common, given the title choice of the article, but let’s dive in on these topics in a highly personal fashion. What are Common Aesthetics?

As I like to call them, Common Aesthetics are artistic and stylistic movements that through history allowed arts to thrive and evolve.
“Genres”, as we would call them today thanks to the influence of a commercial-oriented society, such as 1600s’ Baroque, 1700s’ Classicism or 1800s’ Romanticism, are what I identify as Common Aesthetics:
one after another they can outline a clear evolution path where not only one style is the successor of the other, but where every artist is a part of that common artistic style.

These “Common Aesthetics” are what in the past allowed for the thriving of art, as every composer had already a given set of “rules” to follow in order to be “accepted” into the artistic scene, and could use these rules to give himself a solid structure on which he could build his own style.

Trends, on the other hand, are micro-variations on the Common Aesthetic, variations that define the evolution of the aforementioned common style. For example, a trend is the tendency of a certain set of composers to write their works of music in a virtuosic manner during the XIX century like piano authors such as Liszt, Chopin and many others.
Another example of a trend, is the tendency of national styles during the baroque period, which can be exquisitely extrapolated from Bach’s works such as his English and French suites, of his Harpsichord Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052) which is based on the italian style of Vivaldi. These two elements are what allowed us to comprehend and follow the evolution of arts all through history, but if Trends are still alive today, not the same can be said of Common Aesthetics:

Following the rising of literature and visual art’s avant-gardes in late 1800s, music also began to fragment into a large amount of currents around the second and third decades of the 1900s with authors like Schoenberg, Boulez and others, yet not in a derivative way of what was until then the Common Aesthetic.

In late 1800s the archetype of the intellectual faced a severe crisis, as the people began to see the artist and the intellectual as a useless parasite which despised the new values of the capital society and the lower classes.

Aestheticism became the new rule of many artists, encompassing many different currents:
D’Annunzio made his life a work of art with his memorable deeds (the flight over Wien, the conquest of Fiume);
Pre-raphaelites Ruskin and Rossetti aspired to Dante’s depiction of Middle-Ages in Vita Nuova;
Painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin searched the “primal” in colors and forms in a simplification of the “high” pictorial vision.

The society built in the late 1800s, and which lives to this day (even if slightly modified and “modernized”), is a society that divide roles and mansions, sickly exalts individualism and has lost the true identity of artists and intellectuals, in favor of a more “visually pleasing” materialistic side of life and an ever-increasing decadentism and nihilism.

This division of art saw a new high in the 1900s with the advent of “atonality” (which is a term I despise since it means “non-tonal”, representing a very limited amount of techniques of the avant-gardes, yet meaning “everything not tonal”, thus signifying also diatonic modal music) and musical avant-gardes.

The refusal of tradition allowed composers like Schoenberg to create incredible techniques like Dodecaphony, which evolved in Serialism (a less-strict form of Schoenberg’s technique), and paved the road for all the 2nd 1900s’ currents like New Complexity, Spectralism, Structuralism and so on.
Yet, it meant the refusal of a system which was developed in the arc of a millennia and that was based on physics, more than anything philosophical (like the new music currents).

The democratic idea of Dodecaphony was that of complete coherence of music material, using a serie of twelve notes which created the chromatic total of an octave where no note was more important than the other, unlike in tonal and modal music, where there’s always a Tonic (or Finalis), even in the most chromatic and fluid music of Wagner and Mahler.

This new concept of a music that defied the weight of tradition (yet paradoxically using musical forms of the past, like Sonatas, Concertos and Symphonies) allowed for great experimentation, emancipating sound from the restrictions of tonality (which as we told earlier, is based on physics, as illustrated by Jean Philippe Rameau’s Armony Treaty of 1722) and allowing composers to play with sound in its more pure form.

The technological advancements of XX century, in particular the invention of the phonograph and of synthesizers, made it so that music could be made of pure sound, were it synthesized or was it the decontextualized recording of a train arriving at a station, and could also be played without the need of performers on stage thanks to playback systems.

Unfortunately, these advancements and currents became tainted by men’s need to feel superior:
if art’s evolution always followed latest philosophical ideals and was fueled by the need to either amplify the liturgy or the need of a leader to adorn his feud, now art (also thanks to Aestheticism) doesn’t need any commissioner, and needs no motive other than “art for art’s sake”.

It comes without surprise that, if Verdi’s operas were known by all, now “high” music is known by no one except other academics or aficionados. Measuring themselves with the great composers of the past, composers could not stand the weight of the greatness of Beethoven and his state funerals, or the fame of Handel, and the success of Brahms, and started closing themselves in their Ivory Towers, blaming the uneducated people for their lack of musical knowledge.

While the people is generally lacking in music education, especially today where music is relegated to an hour of recreation in Italy’s middle schools, what people doesn’t lack is an evolutionary preference for simple mathematical intervals, and a predisposition towards a certain type of music, and that’s where physics comes in in this article:

In Silvia Bencivelli’s “Why do we like music?”, there’s a paragraph which inquires the similarities between men and monkeys when it comes to preferences of musical intervals:
what has been found is that men (and monkeys) have a natural tendency to prefer consonant intervals like the octave and the fifth (which harmonically are 2/1 and 3/2 higher than the low fundamental note), and tends to dislike consonant intervals like the 7th or the minor second.

The first experiments on polyphonic music that happened in the 1100s in Notre-Dame by Magister Leoninus and Perotinus resulted in the preference for octaves and fifths, which were regarded in the centuries to come as the most perfect of intervals in a mixture of Pitagora’s teachings (he was the first to discover the mathematical relationships between intervals) and of taste.

These fundamental “rules” (which were not rules, as they were theorized long after they were applied) defined european music for centuries to come, and the consequent discovery of the tensive properties of tonal music (which is a derivation of modal music) and classification of its parameters by Rameau later defined music until 1900s composers decided to completely disregard tradition in favor of a system born from politic ideals.

It goes almost without saying, according to eminent composer Luciano Berio, that education defines tastes, so a child grown with dodecaphonic music will eventually come to like that style, yet I think this is hardly the reality of the world we live in.
If my grandmother had wheels she would be a cart, but she does not have wheels for arms and legs, and she would not be a cart anyway (maybe a Transformers), as we say in Italy.

The much-vaunted superiority of classical composers, stuck with their closed-shut minds in their Ivory Towers, didn’t certainly help the people appreciate music like they always did all through history.
Liturgical chants, symphonies, operas, they were all highly appreciated from the public, which filled concert halls and theaters long before 1900s intellectuals decided that the ignorant people did not have any education (and would not need to have one anyway), completely forgetting that people in 1900s were the main reason to why discographic houses existed:
they bought records of music, creating one of the biggest markets to ever exist.

Still today people highly regard music as an entertainment form, from pop music to movie soundtracks, yet they are obviously not interested anymore in “high” music, a genre of music they can not understand due to its difficult nature, and the jerky attitude of academics surely doesn’t help.

In conclusion, where is the paradox? Where are the contradictions?

As long as contradiction goes, I personally prefer to use certain techniques to convey certain concepts or emotions:
in my work for orchestra “t”, I used a ligeti-like micropolyphony technique, choosing to use the chromatic total of a perfect 5th divided and orchestrated to achieve a sense of chaos, gurgling and movement which represents the chaos and disorder of the pre and post-Big Bang universe, from which I later subtract frequencies to leave only the perfect 5th as a representation of the order subsequent the annihilation of matter and antimatter (although with a dissonance in the double basses to represent the Background Radiation, what remains of the original chaos).
Yet, I would hardly utilize dodecaphony to describe a dream-like situation, or would use spectralist techniques to portray the greatness of God in a Mass.

The contradictions are what always made me turn up my nose regarding certain authors: why cut the ties with past and tradition, but keep the same musical forms which were developed with in mind the functions of that same tradition you avoid?

And the paradox regards competitions and trends:

The latest trend is a post-avant-garde style that keeps ties with the currents of the mid to late 1900s, but which has exhausted every possibility of innovation, focusing on infinite glissandos, trills and harmonics.

As everyone who has listened to my music knows, I personally almost never write in this style, as the topics I write about are of a more spiritual and meditative nature, and would clash with such a harsh and nihilistic aesthetic; I do not dislike the aesthetic, as I’m a big fan of the 1900s' avant-gardes, yet I find them to be without a future.

Unfortunately, judges of national and international competitions were born in that aesthetic, thrived in it, and want to keep the terminally ill currents alive by either forcing their style on their students (which then wins the competitions) or by selecting the works which more come close to what they personally write.
Some composers almost don't even know the tradition on which our music is built on, and can’t obviously teach what they don’t know (even if some do try, doing more bad than good).

That’s the case of some composers overseas, which completely forgot the importance of psychological and physiological perception of the musical form, teaching their students that “as long as you write interesting chord progressions it’s all good”.

How can we return art to the people, and people to art, if some decrepit composers of failed currents keep maintaining them alive, teaching that it’s people’s fault for not understanding “true art”?