Beauty in Music

Introduction

The vast wealth and variety of phenomena in compositional output and musical life during the twentieth century, resulting from revolutionary social and technological changes, the questioning or reevaluating of all existing values and views, the embroilment of composers in politics and ideologies, and the appearance of new institutions and organisations steering musical life make it extremely difficult to provide a coherent description of the history of musical culture, bringing out both the continuity and the change. The multitude of composition techniques and aesthetic outlooks among composers, the fascination with new technological advancements in terms of creating, capturing and propagating musical works, and finally the complex question of patronage and the funding of artistic work, split into ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘elite’ and ‘mass’, force one to undertake comprehensive research into both proclaimed aesthetic views and composed works, and also the mechanisms behind the functioning of musical life. Thus any synthesising study of the history of twentieth-century music – a study that highlights the dynamics of the changes over the period in question – must address issues not encountered in the interpretation of the music and musical life of previous centuries, particularly since there are no convincing methodological models available.

During the first half of the twentieth century, music historiography was dominated by two conceptual approaches to synthesising studies, referring to a biological and an idealistic model of history. In keeping with the premises of positivism, the history of music conceived as an autonomous entity is the history of genres and forms, schools and styles, interpreted through the metaphor of a biological organism with a period of growth, flourishing and decay.¹ That change supposedly resulted from the action of ‘historical forces’ independent of the will of composers. The evolutionist strand in historiography also assumed that music developed out of a single hypothetical ‘germ’ and that processual changes displayed a linear evolution and were conditioned by ‘historical necessity’.

Music history referring to a model rooted in idealistic philosophy, meanwhile, presupposed the existence of some ‘spirit of the time’ (Zeitgeist), expressed in all artistic products of a given epoch, so it affects the similarity of creative actions undertaken over a given period in different fields of art.² Hence the historian’s attention focussed on bringing out that similarity in different works of art and literature and on attempting to specify the properties of a given ‘spirit of the time’, since music was treated as its ‘embodiment in sound’. According to this model, a synthesis of music history assumes a vast field of research encompassing the stylistic criticism of selected works, issues relating to composers’ aesthetic outlooks, and aspects of musical life and the social functioning of music, but it subordinates them to a general assumption of the existence and influence of some ‘spirit of the time’.

In works on twentieth-century music published during the second half of that century, one is struck by approaches in which the author accentuates the equiponderance, and at the same time the distinctness, of European and American musical output (the music written by composers born in Europe is discussed separately from that written by those born in America³) and highlights the idea of ‘national music’, separately profiling the music written by composers born in a particular country.⁴ Yet the active presence of many composers in different musical centres around the world, resulting partly from the ease of international travel or from the decision to emigrate from the country of their birth (taken for various reasons) and adopt different citizenship raise questions about this type of proposition for ordering the history of music of the twentieth century.

The Zeitgeist concept assumes the existence of trends (so-called ‘isms’ – impressionism, expressionism) common to a variety of artistic work within a given period, as well as a linear sequence – determined by ‘historical necessity’ – of changes within the domain of ‘musical material’ as specifically understood. Under the influence of Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949⁵), historians’ attention concentrated on accentuating the opposition between what was ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ in the art of composition. In syntheses of the history of music of the last century, there also appeared propositions for describing the work of just a few selected composers, but their selection was open to debate.⁶ Previous studies have been dominated by the ideology of progress and focussed on the achievements of avant-garde composers.⁷ Another methodological solution proposed by musicologists involves quasi-lexical studies containing differing numbers of composer profiles. Their selection varies a great deal and reflects either the aesthetic preferences of the author (or the editor) or else a desire to present even ‘minor’ composers belonging to a chosen nation (state).⁸ One interesting and original discourse on the music of the twentieth century is Maciej Gołąb’s book Musical Modernism in the Twentieth Century. Between Continuation, Innovation and Change of Phonosystem.⁹ The author proposes the notion of a phonosystem as an autonomous philosophical entity of an historical character.

Two fundamental premises behind a modernist historiography of music are the principle of the linear evolution and historical necessity of changes to the ‘musical material’ and the concept of the musical work as a text or score (and as the ideal ‘work’ as distinct from performances and scores).¹⁰ Twentieth-century narratives of music history concentrated on describing the evolutionary changes to the ‘musical material’ and ‘compositional means’, and they employed the hypostasised notions of ‘style’, ‘trend’ and ‘ism’.¹¹ According to Georg G. Iggers, author of Historiography in the Twentieth Century,¹² during the last century, greater significance for people’s understanding of historical events and the connections between them was gained by structures and processes rather than events and the actions of ‘great individuals’. Today, however, historiography is centred not on impersonal economic, social or cultural structures and processes, but on the existential experiences of people.¹³ Questions are increasingly being posed about the meaning and value of the actions people take, including in the domain of artistic creation. The postmodernist philosophy of music history and theory (preferring the current of historical anthropology) places the accent on the notional and social context of artistic output, on its personal aspect, on studying mentality and proposing a concept of the musical work as a sounding object.¹⁴ A cultural-anthropological look at twentieth-century music is proposed by both The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004¹⁵) and Richard Taruskin’s monumental work The Oxford History of Western Music (2005¹⁶), two volumes of which are devoted to music of the twentieth century. According to Taruskin:

all artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people, through whose cooperation the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be.¹⁷

An original model for discourse on the history of European music was proposed by Karol Berger in his book A Theory of Art, combining philosophy with history, essentialism with historicism. In Berger’s opinion, we should consider the possibility of a music history centred on the development of music’s aims, because in our times, questions about the link between aesthetics and ethics are crucial.

What should the function of art be, if art is to have a value for us? […] if art is to be considered a worthwhile occupation […] A history of music is usually told as a history of style, and its traditional periodization is stylistic. What we should consider is the possibility of a music history centred on aims, with a periodization obeying the internal rhythm of the development of music’s aims. It simply makes sense to describe the aims without talking about the means, but not the reverse.¹⁸

Berger emphasises that a score only supports our memory of the imagined or real sound and that the ideal ‘work’ (distinct from both performances and scores) is a non-existent entity.

A musical work […] is a real (or imagined) sounding object, identical with what is usually called a ‘performance’. […] The ideal ‘work’ is the result of a typical seduction by language, a concept with no useful job to do (apart from providing an entertaining metaphysical puzzle for professional philosophers and a shortcut for musicians).¹⁹

The book Beauty in Music represents an attempt to highlight the aesthetic doctrines that have stimulated composers to employ suitable means to realise the aims and ideas that inspired them. As Stravinsky wrote, ‘every doctrine of aesthetics, when put into practice, demands a particular mode of expression – in fact, a technique of its own’.²⁰ Those aims and ideas were propagated by outstanding personalities, as well as associations and institutions as part of traditional or new social practices, particularly the practice of public concerts. Thus the methodological premises behind this book adhere to the current of research into mentality: Beauty in Music takes account of the notional and social context of the music written during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the concept of a musical work as a sounding object. The proposed historiographic construct is based on the assumption that this diversity of artistic phenomena and aesthetic attitudes manifested by composers can be interpreted as a dispute over values, bound up with two antinomic visions of reality:

1. (1) a reality in keeping with the ancient (biblical) vision of the world as a cosmos and of people cultivating the traditional values of European culture linked to the Platonic triad;
2. (2) a reality in keeping with the modernist vision of the world as chaos and of ‘Faustian man’ fascinated by the ideology of progress and with a ‘realm of freedom’ beyond good and evil.²¹

In the history of music, this dispute has been linked, for example, to the choice between the ‘Apollonian spirit’ (associated with classical order, euphonic sound and ‘tamed romanticism’, with acceptance of the idea of beauty that for centuries accompanied reflection on human artistic activities, but in the twentieth century was ‘condemned to exile’) and to the ‘Dionysian-Promethean spirit’ and the ideology of progress in art (associated with such things as the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ and the acceptance of noise and chaos). Around the turn of the twenty-first century, after the demise of the ideology of progress in art, there occurred a distinct renaissance of the idea of beauty in artistic work. Composers abandoned experimental, avant-garde acoustic effects and sought compositional means that evoked the impression of lyrical cantilena and subtle euphonic sonorities. And in academic circles, the idea of beauty – linked to the fundamental need to experience delight, including in contact with a work of art – aroused heightened interest not just among philosophers, but also among psychologists and neurobiologists.²² During the twenty-first century, we have come to accept the fact that a sense of beauty and the need to experience it is a crucial part of human nature.²³

In my interpretation of the changes in musical composition and the functioning of music during the twentieth century, I assumed the co-existence of several different philosophical-aesthetic ideas that linked art to the notion of the sublime or a quasi-religious mystery, to revolution and avant-garde experimentation, to the elevation of noise, to the dilemma of determinism-indeterminism and to slogans aimed at the ‘progressive elites’ or the ‘proletarian masses’, and also of ideas that sporadically vied with the traditional concept of order and beauty in European culture. Robert Reilly, in his book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (2016),²⁴ writes that the beautiful in music somehow managed not just to exist, but even to thrive in a century marked by brutal political ideologies and perverse intellectualism.

Those ideological aims were more or less distinctly articulated, more or less popular and accepted in a given period of time, but they existed alongside one another, underwent metamorphoses under the sway of generational and civilisational changes. I do not specify when exactly the caesurae occurred, assuming that they were generally determined by the global cataclysms of the first and second world wars and the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War. The start of the proposed historical construct is marked by the growing cult of Richard Wagner and his vision of art (Zukunftsmusik) towards the end of the nineteenth century and the artistic-aesthetic manifestos formulated in the 1870s and 80s inscribed in a pantheistic or nihilistic vision of reality. They bore a crucial influence over the re-evaluation of the semantic scope to the notion of ‘music’ established in European culture and the imparting of new meaning to it, which determined the aims of artistic work in the twentieth century. A crucial caesura is the end of the Cold War and the official demise of the ideology of progress (perpetuated in a different way, however, during the times of ‘liquid modernity’²⁵), provoking composers to seek new creative ideas in the era of rock music culture, but also to clearly define their aesthetic outlook with regard to the traditional values in European culture: the Platonic triad and the world described in the Bible.

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The book is divided into three parts, entitled 1. ‘Towards modernity’ 2. ‘The height of modernity’, 3. ‘In the fetters of late modernity’. The first three chapters (1. ‘In the shadow of Wagner and Nietzsche’, 2. ‘The ideas of pantheism, theosophy, futurism and their resonance in the art of musical composition’, 3. ‘Interest in non-European and old pagan cultures’) generally concern significant events in European and American culture of the turn of the twentieth century that were described in art criticism as new notions. Their axiological value evolved from a negative to a positive ‘colouring’. Under the sway of a pantheistic concept of nature, the purpose of an artwork was not so much to arouse delight, to bring out euphonic sounds and a distinct order to the construction of musical time as to evoke the ‘lofty’ and ‘mysterious’, triggering a quiver of anxiety or a quasi-erotic ecstasy. Nietzschean nihilism, meanwhile, provoked cries of despair and metaphysical terror (associated with dissonant sounds and stark colours). Inspired by a fascination with the ‘world of machines’, constructed by people, artists began glorifying its sounds, and also the power and effect of rapid movement. In the fourth chapter (4. ‘The controversial idea of national music’), I discuss disputes that arose between the wars over the model of musical culture, inspired by the concept of ‘national’ music.

In the second part of the book, ‘The height of modernity’, in the next two chapters (5. ‘The dispute over the aesthetics of modern music’, 6. ‘The dispute over “unity in variety” in the art of composition and the notion of progress’), I interpret the discussions that arose between the two world wars over ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ music. Under the sway of Dada and surrealism, a vision of the world coloured by absurdity and senselessness became attractive, prompting artists to undertake a variety of experiments. And under the sway of neopositivism, the model of artistic work became a concept of the world as an impersonal Logic – a concept that inspired artists to use abstract forms in their work and composers to subordinate the notation of scores to an abstract idea, a pre-compositional basic pitch class set – a series of signs of musical notation. They vied with a new concept of art referring to the ideal of ‘eternal classicism’. The next two chapters (7. ‘Avant-garde ideas of serialism, aleatorism and sonorism’, 8. ‘The Cold War in musical culture, the yearning for beauty and the joy of making music’) cover issues related to musical life, which during the period of the Cold War was marked by the shadow of the Iron Curtain, dividing the art world into two parts: one part ‘enslaved’ by the concept of socialist realism ‘for the masses’, the other ‘liberated’ by the avant-garde experiments addressed to ‘elites’, that is, connoisseurs of progressive art, which dominated in democratic countries.

In the third part, entitled ‘In the fetters of late modernity’ (chapters 9. ‘The decline of the idea of progress and the search for new creative ideas’ and 10. ‘Liberation from the pressure of the avant-garde: postmodern games with tradition, the “musical ark” and the biblical world in music’), I discuss creative propositions during the postmodern age, marked on one hand by acceptance of the idea of ‘diversity’ and a Nietzschean vision of reality ‘beyond good and evil’ (also ‘beyond beauty and ugliness’) and on the other by attempts to pursue musical output inscribed within a concept of the world as cosmos, order and harmony, so art in which the wealth and beauty of euphonic sounds and reflection inspired by texts from the Bible reappear. In the last chapter (11.‘“Eternal” classicism and existential dilemmas in music’), I have attempted to describe the phenomenon of the creative personality of Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as signalling issues linked to the discourse of music in contemporary culture that are crucial to the humanities today, since I agree with Karol Berger, who writes that ‘music represents the central features and dilemmas of the social and historical situation of art today in a particularly radical, acute and clear fashion’.²⁶

I have proposed a quasi-dramatic construct that attempts to highlight the dispute over the ‘essence of music’ and its significance in the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have tried to avoid specialist terminology derived from analysis of the musical work. Hence this book, although addressed primarily to university students of the humanities and students of music academies, may also prove useful for music lovers interested in the history of the dispute over beauty in art of the twentieth century. The English version of this book is a modified version of the second edition (from 2018) of the book Spór o piękno muzyki w kulturze XX i XXI wieku, which was a considerably expanded version of the first edition from 2004 (prepared thanks to a grant from the Committee for Scientific Research [no. HO1E 00119], which I received between 2000 and 2003).

1 See Guido Adler (ed.), Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1924).

2 See Ernst Bücken (ed.), Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, 9 vols (Potsdam: Akademie Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1927–1934).

3 See Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (New York: Norton, 1961). The author divides this book into three parts: 1. ‘The Material of Contemporary Music’, 2. ‘The European Scene’, 3. ‘The American Scene’.

4 See W. W. Austin, Music in the 20^th Century, from Debussy through Stravinsky (London: Dent, 1966); R. P. Morgan (ed.), Modern Times. From World War I to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).

5 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik [1949] (Darmstadt: Wissenshaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998).

Adorno divided his book into two parts: 1. ‘Schönberg und der Fortschritt’, 2. ‘Strawinsky und die Reaktion’. Cf. Eng. tr. as Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (London: Sheed & Ward, 1973) (‘Schoenberg and Progress’; ‘Stravinsky and Restoration’).

6 For example, in William W. Austin’s Music in the 20th Century, the titles of chapters contain the names of composers (III. Debussy’s 20th-Century Music; XII. Schoenberg to the Twelve-Tone Technique (1922); XIII. Bartók to the Dance Suite (1923); XIV. Stravinsky to the Octet and The Wedding (1923); XVI. Schoenberg to His Death (1951); XVII. Bartók to His Death (1945); XVIII. Stravinsky to The Rake’s Progress (1951); XIX. Webern; XX. Varèse, Orff, Messiaen, and Many Others; XXI. Hindemith; XXIV. Prokofiev; XXVII. Stravinsky to His Eightieth Birthday) or the names of states (IV. Contemporaries in America, Australia, Japan; V. … in Slavic Lands; VI. … in England and Northern Europe; VII. … in Italy and Southern Europe; VIII. … in Austria-Hungary; IX. …in Germany; X. … in France),

https://www.amazon.com/Music-20th-Century-Debussy-Stravinsky/dp/0393333892?asin=0393333892&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1.

7 Cf. Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After. Directions since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

8 Cf. David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-Century Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968); Larry Sitsky (ed.), Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002).

9 Maciej Gołąb, Musical Modernism in the Twentieth Century. Between Continuation, Innovation and Change of Phonosystem, tr. Wojciech Bońkowski (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2015).

10 Twentieth-century music writing adopted Jean Molino’s theory of tripartition: the musical work (as the score and its analysis), the composer (as the act of creating the work), the listener (as the process of perception). See Jean Molino, ‘Fait musical et semiologie de la musique’, Musique en jeu, 11 (1976), 37; Jean Molino, J. A. Underwood and Craig Ayrey, ‘Musical Fact and the Semiology of Music’, Music Analysis, 9/2 (1990), 105–156.

11 See Glenn Stanley, ‘Music Historiography’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2000), xvii:547–561.

12 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

13 Ibidem, 13; Leo Treitler, ‘The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, in Nicolas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 356–377.

14 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

15 The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

16 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) (vol. 4. Music in the Early Twentieth Century; vol. 5. Music in the Late Twentieth Century).

17 Ibidem, vol. 1. Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, p. XXIX.

18 Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9, 12, 115.

19 Ibidem, 53, 54.

20 Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), 19

21 See Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

22 See Bill Beckley and David Shapiro (eds), Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetic (New York: Allworth, 1998); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Anchor, 2000); Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); George Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival. A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

23 The philosopher Roger Scruton argues for the importance and transcendental nature of beauty in the documentary film Why Beauty Matters (dir. Louise Lockwood, 2000). The film was part of the BBC’s Modern Beauty Season, which consisted of a number of programmes on the topic of beauty and modernity broadcast in November and December 2009. Why Beauty Matters premiered on BBC Two on 28 November 2009.

24 Robert R. Reilly, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (San Francisco: Ignatus, 2016).

25 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

26 Berger, A Theory of Art, VIII.