On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Peter Dorman wrote:
> open-ended science of musical development. He takes his themes apart,
> works with just a few notes ("cells") or just the rhythm and dazzles the
> listener with the complexity he is able to achieve. The formalistic
> impulse that had always been present in European music was released from
> its conventions and permitted to flourish according to its own logic.
> This aspect of Beethoven went into abeyance after his death, but was
> resurrected by the great formalists of the 20th century -- Schoenberg,
> Hindemith, Bartok, etc.
But you're assuming that our sense of hearing is a historical invariant,
i.e. stays the same, whereas it's the composers who change their
techniques and styles. This isn't so: Jameson's point (he's really just
quoting Adorno) is that music (the formal aesthetics of sound) is
historical through and through, that our very capacity to hear is
historical. What kind of complexity did Beethoven create, precisely? A
complexity based on motivic composition: you have a basic theme, it gets
turned upside down, rightside up, etc. Put bluntly, Beethoven's themes are
the functional equivalent of the national anthem: they organize their
material into a musical marketplace, with clearly-defined classes and
castes (peasant rhythms for the agrarian producers, the violins for the
bourgeoisie, the trumpets for the nobilitarian armies, etc.). After
Beethoven's era, you simply could not do this anymore: industrial
capitalism began to level societies down into the owners of capital and
the industrial workingclass -- and so for the 2nd Viennese school, each
instrumental voice would become the equivalent, thanks to atonality, of
every other one. The autonomous tone-row becomes the fundamental unit of
musical time, rather than the cadence. The gainer in this was, of course,
an increase in orchestration, or the sheer ability to produce a wider and
wider array of sounds. Nowadays this dialectic has continued in the form
of studio music, or what's better known as hip hop -- essentially a
multinational art form, capable of accessing sonic materials undreamt-of
by the 19th century.
-- Dennis
