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Music Beyond Narcissism: A Glance Over the Post Avant-Garde
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11353 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
3,020 Words |
| Author
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Daniel Charles
Daniel Charles is founding director of the Department of Music
and professor of philosophy of music at the University of
Paris VIII. Until 1986 he was dean of the faculty of Arts of
the same university. |
In his brilliant paper "A New Romanticism?" (The World & I, No. 8), Kenneth LaFave has very convincingly shown how in our epoch a kind of "pattern principle" has been substituted for the expressive principle of Romanticism. Our music, he argues, lacks the dynamism that had grown out of the tonal system; we have gained the "completely dissonant" Serialism on one side and the "completely consonant" Minimalism on the other-but while mutually exclusive, they complement each other in that they use only static patterns. If Romanticism is over, have we gained anything?
I concur with Kenneth LaFave' pars destruens, which points to the necessity for the composer of today to keep a distance from any "pattern" of this sort. But I question relying upon the "dynamism" of tonality: Even if tonality is still alive, to pin one's faith on it may run the risk of narrowing the span of contemporary music, by reducing its reign to the "ethnocentric" field of the Western European tradition of the last two centuries. We may deplore the fact that the New Romanticism appears today only as a by-product, but we cannot forget that the very opposition between "dynamic" tonality and "static" non-tonality is a typically modern one; after all, the "dynamics" was the complementary part of the "statics" in Auguste Comte's "positivism."
As far as dynamism is concerned, we may wonder whether it is perceived as such in our performances of past music in equal temperament, where all intervals sound alike since the differences among the keys have vanished. "Until the sixteenth century, music had been composed around that instrument of infinitely variable intonation, the human voice. After the sixteenth century, music began to be composed around the fixed intonation of
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