What is There to Sing About? A Credo
by
Eric Paul Nolte
After a performance that included two pieces from a song cycle I am writing, a new friend asked me if I would answer the question of how I work at creating music, of how I approach the creative process. In essence this essay is an expanded version of what I wrote my friend.
While I continue to write instrumental music, I find myself completely smitten by music for the human voice. My love of music can be captured by my new animating credo, which is now in the form of an answer to the question: what is there to sing about?
This question, after a lifetime of not really knowing or caring much about vocal music, comes to me thanks to my treasured wife, who in recent years turned my attention to precisely the right angle so that I could become infused and illuminated by the power of song, and fall in love with this glory which is the human voice and the marriage of words and music.
Song has the singular power to grab us by the soul in a way that seems utterly to bypass the critical and conceptual mind. So I am devoting myself to answering this question of what there is to sing about!
My answer is in the form of a credo: I believe in the power of the human spirit to be an exalted force and to do good things in the world, but being and doing so are neither instinctual nor easy! Art, all good art, provides us with something like fuel for our spirit, as we labor at our time-consuming dreams and projects. So I am devoting myself to creating words and music with the purpose of moving people deeply (which would have to start with me, myself, of course!)
I want to write songs that can make one feel uplifted, deeply moved, or inspired to seek edification and insight. In the end, I want to write songs that allow one to feel swept up by the waves of love and human connection, to feel awe and wonder before the beauty of the earth and at the enduring mysteries of existence. If these songs should also engage us with The Big Questions of life, then so much the better.
I want to write songs that can make one feel uplifted, deeply moved, or inspired to seek edification and insight. In the end, I want to write songs that allow one to feel swept up by the waves of love and human connection, to feel awe and wonder before the beauty of the earth and at the enduring mysteries of existence. If these songs should also engage us with The Big Questions of life, then so much the better.
By the way, I believe we are each on this earth to create lives of joy, meaning, and purpose, and to do so by our own lights. Music should be one of those exalted areas that, as I said, give us fuel to keep moving in the direction of our greater unfolding, the long-term happiness that Aristotle identified as eudaimonia, and which Ayn Rand expanded and refined as the ethics of rational egoism.
How to move towards creating such music? This may have been much easier for others than for me. I am saddled by a college education in music and philosophy, and ironically enough, a background like this can leave one feeling tongue-tied and hobbled by crashing waves of contradictory pronouncements and judgments that issue from warring schools of aesthetics. Finding my way, finding any confidence in my own voice, was a struggle. This struggle was because I embodied all these warring schools and they left me scarcely able to recognize myself even in a mirror. In a sense, these contradictory edicts left me musically blind and deaf to myself.
There were three warring schools of thought that sank me when I was in school: the twelve-tone counterpoint created by Arnold Schoenberg, the aleatory music of the sort begun by John Cage, and the musical minimalism of such composers as Philip Glass.
Incidentally, this aesthetic paralysis may go some way towards explaining why I abandoned the pursuit of music as a living, and turned instead to aviation. In airplanes, I found rational principles employed to fulfill this ancient human yearning to fly. Objective reason, by which I mean logic applied to the evidence of experience, allowed rational humans to bring this perennial, lofty human ambition down to earth. Airplanes made sense to me, and inspired awe and wonder. Music, new so-called serious art music, made little sense that I could grasp, and brought me aesthetic vertigo (even though, of course, I still loved the practice of great music of the past.)
In the decades since leaving college, I have slowly reconstituted myself and my understanding of the crazy aesthetics that had so immobilized me. I found that in the mainstream, philosophy has been in an abysmal pit for centuries, and today we see something like a dogfight between religious absolutism and postmodern, nihilistic skepticism. This skepticism militantly, absolutely, and therefore ironically denies the possibility of our being able to know anything about anything with confidence. Aesthetics in general has been a victim of this hapless philosophical turn, and music, in particular, has for most of the last century been in a dizzy, pixilated, and confused state.
Yes, okay, let me acknowledge that this assessment overstates the matter. There is, after all, the long history of jazz, the American musical theater and its many dramatic innovations, starting with Showboat in the 1927, and the American songbook that derives largely from this same musical theater. Yes, there was the work of a legion of accomplished composers, toiling in eclectic vineyards, unaffiliated with any academic school of thought. Think of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein who wrote compelling and beautiful music at a time when the very concept of beauty was problematic in academic circles. Think of those composers of 20th century lieder, or art song, like Ned Rorem, Lee Hoiby, Dominick Argento, and William Bolcom. Think of the serious turn taken by rock and roll, and its inspiration to all genres of popular music. Nevertheless, the point here is that the influential pundits of serious art music were academics who largely upheld the primacy of these three schools of thought: Schoenberg's serialism, John Cage's aleatory music, and the musical minimalism of such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass.
Yes, okay, let me acknowledge that this assessment overstates the matter. There is, after all, the long history of jazz, the American musical theater and its many dramatic innovations, starting with Showboat in the 1927, and the American songbook that derives largely from this same musical theater. Yes, there was the work of a legion of accomplished composers, toiling in eclectic vineyards, unaffiliated with any academic school of thought. Think of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein who wrote compelling and beautiful music at a time when the very concept of beauty was problematic in academic circles. Think of those composers of 20th century lieder, or art song, like Ned Rorem, Lee Hoiby, Dominick Argento, and William Bolcom. Think of the serious turn taken by rock and roll, and its inspiration to all genres of popular music. Nevertheless, the point here is that the influential pundits of serious art music were academics who largely upheld the primacy of these three schools of thought: Schoenberg's serialism, John Cage's aleatory music, and the musical minimalism of such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass.
There were aesthetic skirmishes and feints against the materials of the common practice period in the 19th century. Think of French impressionism, of Debussy and Ravel. But the shattering and decisive turn away from the common practice came around 1910, when Arnold Schoenberg declared that composers had explored every nook and cranny of the musical universe and thereby exhausted all possibility of creating anything profoundly new. What was called for was a wholesale reimagining of the nature of music itself, and Schoenberg presented himself as its prophet.
So this is how we got Schoenberg's serial music, this rationalistic twelve-tone counterpoint that denies the significance of the physics of sound and the construction of diatonic scales and chords which are derived from the overtone series. Such scales (but not the chords, which only appeared in the world with the European music around 1600) are found in the music of all the peoples of the world, according to the ethnomusicologists, like Manfred Clynes, who have studied these matters. These scales and chords, in the European world, were the basis for the common practice period from Palestrina, around 1600, until the turn of the 20th century. But Schoenberg asserted a musical "egalitarianism" that dismissed the common practice chords and scales as nothing more than arbitrary cultural conventions. In an aesthetic world that was well prepared to embrace his ideas, he said that there is nothing to distinguish any of the 12 tones by which we divide the octave. No tone can be more important than any other. There can be no inherent tonal centers and wings, no tonic, no dominant, no subdominant, there can be no natural emotion attached intrinsically to any feature of music, he asserted.
Schoenberg's system requires the building of "tone rows," like a little tune or a riff, in which all 12 tones of the octave must be used once before the composer can use any of those tones again. The tone row is then treated as the subject of the contrapuntal procedures of inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion, in much the same way as practiced by Baroque composers like J. S. Bach. In other words, the notes of the subject are played every which way, front-to-back, upside down and back-to-front. These procedures are all very rationalistic and intellectually rigorous, but by the nature of the 12 tone theory, such compositions tend to have an effect that is unearthly, chilling, and far removed from anything that has ever moved a human heart to dance or sing!
(Footnote. Having called serialism unearthly and chilling, I should acknowledge that Alban Berg, one of Schoenberg's students, wrote 12-tone music that could move human hearts. Think of his violin concerto. But Berg wrote music that featured tone rows composed so as to create tonal centers and capture musical triads like those which were the basis of the materials of the common practice period! So, the degree to which Berg's music could sway a human heart was the same degree to which he deviated from Schoenberg's icy intention to treat every tone of the octave as equal and unrelated to every other tone.)
(Footnote. Having called serialism unearthly and chilling, I should acknowledge that Alban Berg, one of Schoenberg's students, wrote 12-tone music that could move human hearts. Think of his violin concerto. But Berg wrote music that featured tone rows composed so as to create tonal centers and capture musical triads like those which were the basis of the materials of the common practice period! So, the degree to which Berg's music could sway a human heart was the same degree to which he deviated from Schoenberg's icy intention to treat every tone of the octave as equal and unrelated to every other tone.)
Schoenberg's system utterly captured academic music composition for more than half a century! And to this day the French IRCAM, created by Pierre Boulez, continues to purvey the idea, as Boulez put it not long so ago, that no music today can be considered "serious" if it does not fully embrace the techniques of this 12-tone music, this dodecaphony, this serialism. Yeesh....
How Schoenberg's system won over so much of the world of academic music is a story that would seem to stagger one's common sense, until one realizes that at the same time a similar trend was unfolding in the art world. Think of how, starting in the later 19th century, all the traditional materials and goals of art were being attacked and replaced by ideas that ripped apart all of the traditional goals of three-dimensional, representational art that depicted with passion and craft significant and exalted themes of vital human importance, and replaced them either with nothing or with the opposite of these elements. Why such disintegration should have become a major cultural current is a matter of a parallel disintegration in philosophy, beginning in a big way with the reactionary European counter-enlightenment in the 18th century. This is a story beyond the scope of this little blog entry, but the best short account I know of this development is by the philosopher and professor, Stephen Hicks, "Why Art Became Ugly." You can find this essay here:
Schoenberg's system enjoyed such professional support because the academic world was richly prepared for such ideas by more than a century of bizarre philosophical developments that attacked the very foundation of human confidence in the power of reason. Under attack was the capability of the senses to be in contact with the facts of reality, or to know anything about things in themselves, apart from the human mind. The senses were said to be incapable of knowing the truth about the facts of reality, therefore it was argued that we can know nothing with confidence, and, moreover, the power of reason itself was unalterably tainted. The mind did not grasp reality, argued a long line of philosophers from such disparate streams of philosophy as rationalism and empiricism, the mind invented reality. Philosophers as different as Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, had all argued from their separate views, against the power of the mind to grasp reality. The resultant crisis of confidence was shattering, and the crisis in art followed inevitably.
(Footnote. My statement immediately above is both too sweeping and yet not comprehensive enough, but there is deep truth here as well. For a closer reading of the matter, see Stephen Hicks' essay, for starters, then go to Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.
(Well, here's another Footnote. With respect to Descartes as a counter-englightment figure, I would argue that his assertion that Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) was the result of his search for a valid starting point of reason, for an idea or an observation in which he could have absolute confidence in justifying the validity of reason. However, his argument was shortly demonstrated to be fallacious, and led philosophers to take it as more "evidence" that the mind does not grasp reality, but creates it instead. While it was the opposite of Descartes' intention, the result of his work was to undermine confidence in reason. In the pages leading up to his cogito conclusion, Descartes wrote a long series of attacks on sense perception and on every other aspect of human reason. In this area, if not in his mathematics, Descartes' rationalism was of no help at all to the project of the European Enlightenment!)
Now, back to Schoenberg and those who came after him.
How Schoenberg's system won over so much of the world of academic music is a story that would seem to stagger one's common sense, until one realizes that at the same time a similar trend was unfolding in the art world. Think of how, starting in the later 19th century, all the traditional materials and goals of art were being attacked and replaced by ideas that ripped apart all of the traditional goals of three-dimensional, representational art that depicted with passion and craft significant and exalted themes of vital human importance, and replaced them either with nothing or with the opposite of these elements. Why such disintegration should have become a major cultural current is a matter of a parallel disintegration in philosophy, beginning in a big way with the reactionary European counter-enlightenment in the 18th century. This is a story beyond the scope of this little blog entry, but the best short account I know of this development is by the philosopher and professor, Stephen Hicks, "Why Art Became Ugly." You can find this essay here:
http://www.atlassociety.org/why_art_became_ugly
Schoenberg's system enjoyed such professional support because the academic world was richly prepared for such ideas by more than a century of bizarre philosophical developments that attacked the very foundation of human confidence in the power of reason. Under attack was the capability of the senses to be in contact with the facts of reality, or to know anything about things in themselves, apart from the human mind. The senses were said to be incapable of knowing the truth about the facts of reality, therefore it was argued that we can know nothing with confidence, and, moreover, the power of reason itself was unalterably tainted. The mind did not grasp reality, argued a long line of philosophers from such disparate streams of philosophy as rationalism and empiricism, the mind invented reality. Philosophers as different as Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, had all argued from their separate views, against the power of the mind to grasp reality. The resultant crisis of confidence was shattering, and the crisis in art followed inevitably.
(Footnote. My statement immediately above is both too sweeping and yet not comprehensive enough, but there is deep truth here as well. For a closer reading of the matter, see Stephen Hicks' essay, for starters, then go to Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.
(Well, here's another Footnote. With respect to Descartes as a counter-englightment figure, I would argue that his assertion that Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) was the result of his search for a valid starting point of reason, for an idea or an observation in which he could have absolute confidence in justifying the validity of reason. However, his argument was shortly demonstrated to be fallacious, and led philosophers to take it as more "evidence" that the mind does not grasp reality, but creates it instead. While it was the opposite of Descartes' intention, the result of his work was to undermine confidence in reason. In the pages leading up to his cogito conclusion, Descartes wrote a long series of attacks on sense perception and on every other aspect of human reason. In this area, if not in his mathematics, Descartes' rationalism was of no help at all to the project of the European Enlightenment!)
Now, back to Schoenberg and those who came after him.
Decades after Schoenberg's initial work, there came an alternative to this 12-tone counterpoint: aleatory music, a term from a Latin root meaning luck or chance, which is supposed to be music created sort of by chance. John Cage, American mystic and charismatic eccentric, believed that music should reflect the essential nature of existence, which he believed to be found somewhere between determinism and randomness, or in chance itself. Our Will is not free, so how can one capture in music this essence of existence? If we are not endowed with the power to choose anything, how can one choose one tone over another? Cage rolled dice (and consulted the I Ching ) in order to choose the tones of his compositions.
Cage is also famous for an iconic piece called 4'33", in which a pianist sits down before the Black Beast on the concert stage, places a stop watch on the music rack, and waits 4 minutes and 33 seconds, hands quietly folded, then stands up to receive an ovation from the audience. The point of this baffling exercise is to demonstrate that it is naked intention that truly makes music. In other words, your calling something "music" is the very thing that makes it so ... and therefore no technique, craft, or even notes, are required. Yeesh, again! Insanity, but hugely influential, like Schoenberg's work. And yet, parenthetically, for all its bizarre-minded silliness, I must say that I have found some quirky charm in Cage's small pieces for "prepared piano" (which is said to be "prepared" because it has had various bits and pieces of metal and wood inserted between some of the strings of the piano, thereby creating a completely different sonority.)
Another alternative to 12-tone and aleatory music came in the last half of the 20th century in the form of musical minimalism, the work of composers like John Adams and Philip Glass. Fully embracing the aesthetic belief that the essence of musical virtue is always to do something novel, these minimalist composers abandoned the effort to write ever-changing musical phrases, and instead employed dogged, endless repetition of short phrases. Minimalism is musical catatonia, in the name of originality. In my opinion, this obsession with the new for the sake of newness is as silly as saying that architects, in striving for the virtue of originality, should abandon any conventional idea of, say, a roof and walls because we've done all this before! They say these ideas are obsolete and too trivial to bother with anymore! They would argue that architecture has "exhausted itself" (as Schoenberg said of music at the turn of the 20th century) and since we've tried all these things before, we therefore need a new architectural language.
* * *
Now, really, I do believe right down to the marrow of me, that we have a musical nature as an aspect of being human. In the same way that we are endowed by our nature with a physical basis for responding to the taste of food as sweet, sour, salty, or savory, I believe that we are also endowed by our nature to respond emotionally to music that is made of tones selected from the first few harmonics of the overtone series.
Anybody who is not deaf or in a coma knows that I speak the truth here, that our nature as Homo saps makes us feel a wide range of emotions in response to diatonic music, no matter with or without words.
I believe this is self-evidently true, despite the fact that the music to which one responds may vary as widely as the difference between a fugue by Bach and the angry, urban yowling of crude young men shouting rhythmic and rhyming obscenities without melody.
So, for myself, I embrace the palette of sound we receive from the physics of the overtone series. This is the first point of my creative process.
The second point is my belief that worthy music of the sort I want to write, must be rooted in solid craftsmanship.
Musical craft for me involves an understanding of melody above all, because melody is the defining characteristic of music.
Sorry, all you rappers and hipsters out there, this is the brutal truth: ethnomusicologists have studied all the musics of all the larger groups of peoples all over the world, and have found that for all their vast differences of vocal ideals, timbre, and the actual number of tones by which they divide the octave, all peoples make music with tones selected from the first few harmonics of the overtone series, and, here it is, above all: the defining characteristic of music, shared by all these peoples, is melody. (See the work of Manfred Clynes...)
Sorry, all you rappers and hipsters out there, this is the brutal truth: ethnomusicologists have studied all the musics of all the larger groups of peoples all over the world, and have found that for all their vast differences of vocal ideals, timbre, and the actual number of tones by which they divide the octave, all peoples make music with tones selected from the first few harmonics of the overtone series, and, here it is, above all: the defining characteristic of music, shared by all these peoples, is melody. (See the work of Manfred Clynes...)
Melody, in the work I most want to do, is for the purpose of writing songs, and this brings us back to the key question of what on earth should we be singing about?
What is there to sing about?
In short, I want my music to uplift and inspire, to engage, and perhaps even to provoke. Music should make us want to dance and sing, at least in our hearts! So the words matter hugely now.
Setting words to music is a craft in itself. The words must be set in a way that allows them to be heard and felt. I spent two years in Aaron Frankel's workshop at the New School, on writing for the musical theater, which dealt largely with this problem of setting words to music. I have subsequently read a shelf of books on the subject, including lyrics by such masters as Oscar Hammerstein and Stephan Sondheim.
In short, I want my music to uplift and inspire, to engage, and perhaps even to provoke. Music should make us want to dance and sing, at least in our hearts! So the words matter hugely now.
Setting words to music is a craft in itself. The words must be set in a way that allows them to be heard and felt. I spent two years in Aaron Frankel's workshop at the New School, on writing for the musical theater, which dealt largely with this problem of setting words to music. I have subsequently read a shelf of books on the subject, including lyrics by such masters as Oscar Hammerstein and Stephan Sondheim.
For me, after the words and melody, the next elements of musical craft are harmony and counterpoint. Melody is the horizontal movement of succeeding tones through time. Simultaneous melodies, crafted slyly enough, create the vertical dimension, which is harmony. Again, I majored in music. I spent years studying harmony and counterpoint, and I have subsequently run many more laps around these topics.
Books can be written on this matter of craft, the words, melodies, counterpoint, and harmony, but I believe this little meditation of mine frames the subject well enough to get a sense of the whole sweep of the matter, as I see it.
E P N
2014.1110
(revised 2015.28)
(revised 2015.28)
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