Since I am quite interested in both human nature and music (!), I have often thought about wether or not there is a relationship between various aspect of human nature and music.For instance most music is tonal. Is this just random or is tonal music easier for our brain?
Beethoven would have turned the melody from the following "Guess that song" quiz from nature into a nice theme with variations, don't you think so?Paul
I wonder if Messiaen used this bird-song in any of his pieces?
In this way, over a span of several centuries, music perhaps inevitably evolves toward noise?
I tend to be rather skeptical about completely atonal music in the Schoenberg mode. But some time ago I saw a performance on TV of one of his orchestral pieces and, rather to my own surprise, found myself quite fascinated by it. :-)
The problem is that much music basically depends on the creation and resolution of dissonance for its effect and forward movement. But once a particular set of dissonances has been used for a few decades, it ceases to sound dissonant to experienced ears, and composers have to come up with somewhat harsher ones to achieve the same effect. In this way, over a span of several centuries, music perhaps inevitably evolves toward noise? Then we wipe the slate clean by returning to ancient musical times, hence composers like Pärt - by now, medieval music is old enough that instead of sounding bland, we tend to experience it as wonderfully exotic sounding. :-)
Well, don't be surprised; Schönberg is rarely less than fascinating! That said, I presume you to mean one of the Fünf Orchesterstücke Op. 16 of 1909, yet these are by no means "completely atonal"; for example, the 5-note chord that underpins the middle piece, Farben - out of which everything in it grows - has a 6/3 chord of E major at its centre (C-G#-B-E-A) and there are many other tonal allusions spread across all five pieces. There are tonal references all over Schönberg's music, including those works written within 12-note serial practice - and let's not forget that the level of tonality in his music varies from time to time quite widely, for an example of which one has only to consider the Variations for Wind Band in G minor and the Kammersymphonie Nr. 2 in E flat minor, each written when the composer was in his 60s.
I think that you make a good point in the opening part of your statement here, but as it progresses I think that you miss a vital point, which is that, over the past 100 years or so during which the bonds of tonality have been severed, much overtly tonal music has continued to be written in many countries, so what "atonality" has achieved is to broaden expressive capability by adding to the musical languages that preceded it, so no slate has been wiped clean at all!
If memory serves, the piece was titled "Variations for orchestra." It was conducted by Barenboim; rather amusingly, some time before the ending, he had to prevent the audience from bursting into applause after someone, presumably thinking the work had ended, had started clapping. :-)
Yes, indeed, I greatly oversimplified the matter, and my point was sort of semi - but not entirely - facetious.
Topic: post-Schonbergian music and human nature 