Mclaren-ionian: Difference between revisions

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Between these two polar opposites Western music has oscillated throughout recorded history. And it is vital to understand—in this moment of supreme crisis and transformation in music—that both these extremes are necessary for a living vibrant Western music. The post-war hyperrationalism of the Darmstadt school proved a sterile dead end because it represented the total victory of the Apollonian ideal. Total order and absolute discipline won. End of story. Wasn't it?

No, because there is a paradox here... One extreme always leads to its opposite. Throughout Western history, it has always been true that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," as William Blake put it. Boulez and the other Appollonian acolytes of pure Platonic rational idealism in music discovered a strange and disturbing fact: by forcing music into a condition of extreme order through total serialism, they paradoxically produced a music which sounded utterly chaotic. As Iannis Xenakis so thoughtfully pointed out 40 years ago, the effort to force music into a crystalline state of perfect reason led to complete disorder as far as the listener was concerned. The musical effect of total serialism (in which rhythm, timbre, dynamics, pitch were all treated as serial rows and ordered accordingly in extensions of the Schoenbergian RIPM sets), and the sensory effect of this hyperrational total serialism was a statistical and random-sounding dispersion of 12-tet contrapuntal lines into pointillistic events. Such music impinged on the senses as a statistical ensemble, like rain on a tin roof or pixels of white noise on a television screen. This should have come as no surprise.

No, because there is a paradox here... One extreme always leads to its opposite. Throughout Western history, it has always been true that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," as William Blake put it. Boulez and the other Appollonian acolytes of pure Platonic rational idealism in music discovered a strange and disturbing fact: by forcing music into a condition of extreme order through total serialism, they paradoxically produced a music which sounded utterly chaotic. As [[Iannis Xenakis]] so thoughtfully pointed out 40 years ago, the effort to force music into a crystalline state of perfect reason led to complete disorder as far as the listener was concerned. The musical effect of total serialism (in which rhythm, timbre, dynamics, pitch were all treated as serial rows and ordered accordingly in extensions of the Schoenbergian RIPM sets), and the sensory effect of this hyperrational total serialism was a statistical and random-sounding dispersion of 12-tet contrapuntal lines into pointillistic events. Such music impinged on the senses as a statistical ensemble, like rain on a tin roof or pixels of white noise on a television screen. This should have come as no surprise.

The twin extremes of Ionian vs. Athenian, Dionysian vs. Apollonian are umbilically linked. Boulez and Stockhausen forgot the myth of Actaeon, whose crime was not merely to dare to gaze upon supernatural beauty but to dare to do so without being possessed by or possessing it. For this crime Actaeon's own dogs tore him to pieces. As the Tao Te Ching says, the only way to master desire is to yield to it. David Gelertner has pointed out: "After a bit of reflection it becomes inescapable that you don't think just with your brain, you think with your body too—this holds in the sense, roughly speaking, that a violin uses its strings to produce sound; but take away the sounding board—the instrument's bridge and its body—and the sound you wind up with is a thin parody of the real thing." [Gelertner, David, "The Muse In the Machine," Macmillan Inc., New York: 1994, pg. 47]

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 Between these two polar opposites Western music has oscillated throughout recorded history. And it is vital to understand—in this moment of supreme crisis and transformation in music—that both these extremes are necessary for a living vibrant Western music. The post-war hyperrationalism of the Darmstadt school proved a sterile dead end because it represented the total victory of the Apollonian ideal. Total order and absolute discipline won. End of story. Wasn't it?
-No, because there is a paradox here... One extreme always leads to its opposite. Throughout Western history, it has always been true that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," as William Blake put it. Boulez and the other Appollonian acolytes of pure Platonic rational idealism in music discovered a strange and disturbing fact: by forcing music into a condition of extreme order through total serialism, they paradoxically produced a music which sounded utterly chaotic. As Iannis Xenakis so thoughtfully pointed out 40 years ago, the effort to force music into a crystalline state of perfect reason led to complete disorder as far as the listener was concerned. The musical effect of total serialism (in which rhythm, timbre, dynamics, pitch were all treated as serial rows and ordered accordingly in extensions of the Schoenbergian RIPM sets), and the sensory effect of this hyperrational total serialism was a statistical and random-sounding dispersion of 12-tet contrapuntal lines into pointillistic events. Such music impinged on the senses as a statistical ensemble, like rain on a tin roof or pixels of white noise on a television screen. This should have come as no surprise.
+No, because there is a paradox here... One extreme always leads to its opposite. Throughout Western history, it has always been true that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," as William Blake put it. Boulez and the other Appollonian acolytes of pure Platonic rational idealism in music discovered a strange and disturbing fact: by forcing music into a condition of extreme order through total serialism, they paradoxically produced a music which sounded utterly chaotic. As [[Iannis Xenakis]] so thoughtfully pointed out 40 years ago, the effort to force music into a crystalline state of perfect reason led to complete disorder as far as the listener was concerned. The musical effect of total serialism (in which rhythm, timbre, dynamics, pitch were all treated as serial rows and ordered accordingly in extensions of the Schoenbergian RIPM sets), and the sensory effect of this hyperrational total serialism was a statistical and random-sounding dispersion of 12-tet contrapuntal lines into pointillistic events. Such music impinged on the senses as a statistical ensemble, like rain on a tin roof or pixels of white noise on a television screen. This should have come as no surprise.
 The twin extremes of Ionian vs. Athenian, Dionysian vs. Apollonian are umbilically linked. Boulez and Stockhausen forgot the myth of Actaeon, whose crime was not merely to dare to gaze upon supernatural beauty but to dare to do so without being possessed by or possessing it. For this crime Actaeon's own dogs tore him to pieces. As the Tao Te Ching says, the only way to master desire is to yield to it. David Gelertner has pointed out: "After a bit of reflection it becomes inescapable that you don't think just with your brain, you think with your body too—this holds in the sense, roughly speaking, that a violin uses its strings to produce sound; but take away the sounding board—the instrument's bridge and its body—and the sound you wind up with is a thin parody of the real thing." [Gelertner, David, "The Muse In the Machine," Macmillan Inc., New York: 1994, pg. 47]