Music in the Modern Age

Modern Age, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Peter Kalkavage

More than anything else, Surprised by Beauty makes us glad. We rejoice that there are still those for whom music has a spiritual meaning, that a ferocious love of beauty is still alive in the great works of modern composers, and that this love, to quote from the title of Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, seems to be inextinguishable.

1. "Composition with Twelve Tones," in Style and Idea, Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Berkeley, 1975 [Reilly, 217]. Whereas tonal music is hierarchical, twelve-tone music is egalitarian: all the tones in the twelve-tone row must be given equal emphasis, "thus depriving one single tone of the privilege of supremacy." (Reilly, 246) 2. Schoenberg's preoccupation with himself is revealed in the titles to some of his writings: "The Young and I" (1923), "My Blind Alley" (1926), "My Public" (1930), "New Music: My Music" (c. 1930). 3. Schoenberg disapproved of the term atonal. He said that calling his music atonal was like calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning. In the end, however, he resigns himself to the term, saying: "in a short while linguistic conscience will have so dulled to this expression that it will provide a pillow, soft as paradise, on which to rest" (Style and Idea [210]). 4. An essential feature of cosmos is the differentiation of things according to kind. The diatonic order, as opposed to the twelve-tone bag of elements, preserves the kind-character of the different intervals generated from the order. Experience informs us that the perfect fifth, for example, is different in kind from the major third. Twelve-tone music renders this difference in kind meaningless. It would have us live in a world without character. 5. The thought of Pascal and his eternal silences brings to mind the amazing poem by Baudelaire, Reve Parisien, in which the poet fantasizes about a purely visual world: Tout pour l'oeil, rien pour les oreilles! It must be noted that for Pascal and Baudelaire, a world without sound or music, while terrifying, is also strangely attractive. 6. Jacques Maritain helps us steer clear of thinking that the composer's love of nature is a slavish act of imitation. He writes: "Artistic creation does not copy God's creation, it continues it.... Nature is essentially of concern to the artist only because it is a derivation of the divine art in things, ratio artis divinae indita rebus. The artist, whether he knows it or not, consults God in looking at things" (Art and Scholasticism, New York, 1962 [60-61]. 7. Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 1, Article 8.

PETER KALKAVAGE is a Tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.