The Steadfast Flux of Music
Logan K. Young
January 16, 2008
I should certainly hope that even the most casual student of music history can in fact trace, and most acutely at that, the growth and maturation of his subject in the midst of a near millennium's worth of development. (If for some perspectival cataract he cannot, then perhaps his musical prowess is better fitted for the suit and tie ensemble of arts administration rather than the pens and pads and right clicks of academia.) Of course music changes. Furthermore, its changes are indeed the resultant manifestation of its ascent towards a higher, more sophisticated plane of human cognition. Existing in a perpetual state of flux the likes of which only Heraclitus could fathom and perhaps only David Bowie could articulate, music is ch-ch-ch-ch-change. From organum, to equal temperament, to secondary dominants, to bitonality, to hexachordal combinatoriality, to seven-limit microtonality, to real-time electro-acoustic synthesis, music - or at least Western art music anyway (which is really the only true litmus test for informed musicological discourse such as this) - has conspicuously morphed into an incredibly dense an intricately complex matrix of aesthetic creation. Consequently, music today - as an artistic totality - is operating on a much higher cognitive level than it was 75, 20, or even eight years ago. (Well, Western art music is at least.) Concurrently, modern human intelligence - as a cerebral totality - is functioning at a much greater perceptual aptitude than it previously was as well. And while each evolutionary development of music may not necessarily dictate a progressively reciprocal response from the cognitive mind and its constituent faculties (it's actually quite the opposite), as Wayne Bowman reminds us: "Whatever else it may be, music is a product of human minds."
Indeed, it was the early Christian mind that first harmonized the previously monophonic liturgy in perfect parallel intervals. And it took a mind mired in the Enlightenment to devise a tuning theory based upon the twelfth root of two. Moreover, only a post-World War II mind could invoke the supremacy of the economical, omnipresent set-form. And ultimately, only a mind firmly ensconced in our own age of technological anxiety could construct the musical cyborgs of our own epoch. Thus, music matures only as fast as the mind, and to some extent the zeitgeist, will allow. Together, the two act as a sort of pituitary legislature regulating the escalation and expansion of artistic creation. What cannot first be divined by the mind itself indeed cannot be expressed in corollary functions of it – music, poetry, theatre, the plastic arts. Furthermore, even as these ancillary functions themselves grow and evolve into actual humanistic endeavors - music, poetry, theatre, the plastic arts - they are still inextricably bound by the intellectual facility of the mind from whence they originally emerged. In short, the history of music is the history of human thought.
Modern music's greatest teachers of composition - Boulanger, Hindemith, Hanson, Messiaen, perhaps even Ladermann, Druckman and Bresnick - often cautioned their more demagogic students that further musical innovation was no longer possible in their own chosen field. (After all, what could they do that Bach had not initiated, Mozart not perfected and Cage's New School not obliterated.) Well, for the most part, Nadia, Paul, Howard, Olivier, Ezra, Jacob and Martin were right. For at the present time at least, it seems that man - as both artist and thinker - has reached the upper extrema of his invention. As a civilization, it appears that we have journeyed to the brink of both artistic and intellectual discovery as we now know it to exist. So for all iconoclast hopefuls, perhaps the last remaining musical revolution would be to break the triple covalent bonds of that seemingly indomitable natural phenomenon - the harmonic series - and render them asunder. Only then, having conquered God himself, the steadfast flux that is music shall halt altogether and human knowledge shall become what is has so desperately wanted to be since crawling out of the primordial sludge…infinite.
Indeed, it was the early Christian mind that first harmonized the previously monophonic liturgy in perfect parallel intervals. And it took a mind mired in the Enlightenment to devise a tuning theory based upon the twelfth root of two. Moreover, only a post-World War II mind could invoke the supremacy of the economical, omnipresent set-form. And ultimately, only a mind firmly ensconced in our own age of technological anxiety could construct the musical cyborgs of our own epoch. Thus, music matures only as fast as the mind, and to some extent the zeitgeist, will allow. Together, the two act as a sort of pituitary legislature regulating the escalation and expansion of artistic creation. What cannot first be divined by the mind itself indeed cannot be expressed in corollary functions of it – music, poetry, theatre, the plastic arts. Furthermore, even as these ancillary functions themselves grow and evolve into actual humanistic endeavors - music, poetry, theatre, the plastic arts - they are still inextricably bound by the intellectual facility of the mind from whence they originally emerged. In short, the history of music is the history of human thought.
Modern music's greatest teachers of composition - Boulanger, Hindemith, Hanson, Messiaen, perhaps even Ladermann, Druckman and Bresnick - often cautioned their more demagogic students that further musical innovation was no longer possible in their own chosen field. (After all, what could they do that Bach had not initiated, Mozart not perfected and Cage's New School not obliterated.) Well, for the most part, Nadia, Paul, Howard, Olivier, Ezra, Jacob and Martin were right. For at the present time at least, it seems that man - as both artist and thinker - has reached the upper extrema of his invention. As a civilization, it appears that we have journeyed to the brink of both artistic and intellectual discovery as we now know it to exist. So for all iconoclast hopefuls, perhaps the last remaining musical revolution would be to break the triple covalent bonds of that seemingly indomitable natural phenomenon - the harmonic series - and render them asunder. Only then, having conquered God himself, the steadfast flux that is music shall halt altogether and human knowledge shall become what is has so desperately wanted to be since crawling out of the primordial sludge…infinite.
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