scohenberg Archives - Mangoprism

Season	Categories	Published
MP00	Music	Oct 11, 2013

As anyone who has suffered through a 20^th century music history class is aware, ‘Art Music’, or modern classical music, is not the type of playlist you want to blast on Friday night, or at the gym, or on a road trip – pretty much anywhere except maybe an opium den, or an elitist prison. When hearing for the first time the strange and alienating sounds so beloved by modern composers, most people react with asking: Why? Why was this music, so deliberately unrelatable and even offensive, composed and performed? Answering these questions is out of the scope of this article (and there aren’t always good answers), but I will say that ultimately, all that modern and contemporary composers are attempting in their work is to find new and exciting techniques to make sound have an emotional and resonating effect on a human. Sometimes this means placing paperclips on the coils in a piano and rearranging the structural elements of a sonata. Other times this means throwing sticks onto a grid in the dirt and letting the music follow from that. It’s not always good, it’s not always successful, and it’s not always really innovative. But against this general sentiment of ‘Why’, today’s composers ask, ‘why not?’

These composers, however, are not alone in the struggle. What’s fascinating about the development of popular music in this decade is that these composers, stuck so firmly in the ‘weird’ end of the music spectrum, are receiving unsolicited help in their efforts from the garage-band, amateur-turned-headliner music makers enjoying the limelight of music festivals and avid fans. Electronic music, dubstep, and indie rap are actually rife with the techniques and sounds pushed by composers from the 1950’s on. Chances are, if you’re listening to Aphex Twin, XXYYXX, Odd Future, or Danny Brown, you’re embracing the sort of musical idioms and strategies that you would hear coming from a sparsely attended quartet premier in the basement of a university Music department. Here is a brief survey of how, against your knowledge or even will, Arnold Schoenberg and his avant-garde cronies are changing the way you hear music:

Drop the Key

Probably the most significant development of music in the 20^th century was the abandonment of keys and the birth of ‘atonality’. This leads to a lot of 20^th century music sounding very alienating and disorienting, especially to listeners expecting the sort of harmonies used by Mozart and Beethoven. But atonality is in fact not unique to ‘Art Music’: it features pretty prominently in, weirdly enough, electronica, dubstep and rap. But maybe it’s not so weird: I think these genres are actually perfect for progressive treatment of tonality because they offer listeners other things to focus on rather than pitch, freeing up the artists to do some funky things tonally. Dubstep offers us in those classic breakdown sections an assault of crunchy, mechanical sonorities that are so immersive in themselves we don’t listen in for a tonal center the way we would with a Justine Timberlake chorus – we focus instead on the development of these sonorities themselves, the same way John Cage wanted us to focus on the interesting sounds of his modified piano, not the pitches being played. Rap is even more conducive for atonality. The pitch system of a rapper’s verse doesn’t correspond to the notes of a scale in the first place – the human voice has its own, more limited and idiosyncratic range. So we don’t find it so alienating and out of place when the beat and the bass go off to explore atonal territory.

Some artists just dip their toes in the water, the way my favorite composer Olivier Messiaen did in the 1950s. The electronic texture of “About You” (XXYYXX) and the grimy beat of “Hive” (Earl Sweatshirt) both are (technically) tonal but are so ambiguous that it took me, despite four semesters of music theory, a half hour to figure out how the pitches in both operate (they both create ‘bicentric’ chords, drawing the listener to expect two different yet simultaneous resolutions, if you’re dying to know). The wubwubwub breakdown of “Equinox” (Skrillex) is complemented by a tonal melody, but presents phrases of wubs without any tonal grounding, with only the texture of the sound to focus on. Other artists plunge into the strange headfirst: “I Will” (Danny Brown) presents a ‘soundscape’ which never truly lets the listener center themselves on a single pitch, thanks to a weird harmonic texture leaping all over the chromatic scale. “Snow White” (Hodgy Beats feat. Frank Ocean) is, like much late 20^th century music, constructed out of deliberately disorienting intervals and sonorities to disrupt whatever tonal center you much think you can hold on to. The song is a snow-storm of pitch and rhythm, with only Hodgy Beat’s angsty verse and Frank Ocean’s smooth voice to guide you through.

Weird Meter

Another big development that crosses genres from the haute to the underground is the effort to stretch, bend or defy conventions of meter and rhythm in music. For 20^th century composers this meant new time signatures, reorganized musical structures, or even abandoning meter altogether. Doing so, abandoning the metrical conventions of contemporary music, makes demands on the artist to keep the music interesting and engaging enough for the listener to stay committed throughout. This is a challenge that again the avant-garde of electronica and rap have taken up well.

Dubstep and EDM are pioneers of a new musical structure, best characterized by the drop. For so long the landscape of popular music was dominated by essentially one structural form with minimal variation: Introduction, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, maybe a coda with a key change if the producer was feeling adventurous. Dubstep musicians (and some electronic artists) broke out of this mold boldly with a form that focuses not on a chorus but on a musically sophisticated structure based on tension and resolution, two staples of the modern composer’s toolbox. ‘The Drop’ of a dubstep song represents the culmination of a long and hopefully smoothly constructed buildup of dissonance and rhythmic acceleration (tension) leading to a climactic moment when for a second sound stops, to be dominated subsequently by an ear-filling torrent of sound, back in the initial meter and lush with consonance (resolution). Despite presenting such a climax early in the song, many dubstep songs stay interesting thanks to a structure that maintains this exciting tension-resolution pattern.

The New Sonorities

Probably the most ubiquitous development in hip hop and electronica that mirrors the developments of Art Music is one which has been latent throughout this article: the focus and prioritization of new sounds and textures. The flexible and amped voice of Kendrick Lamar, the funky hard-to-place metallic chants of Gold Panda, and of course those delicious wubwubwubs of Dubstep all around have listeners eager to consume new sounds, excited to ‘enter new sound worlds’, to phrase it as a music theorist, a dream long held by modern composers. These trends of course started way back – the Beatles experimented with South Asian music just decades after John Cage and his colleagues began incorporating Indian and Indonesian instruments and traditions into their works. The progressive and enveloping rock of The Dark Side of the Moon came just off the cusp of composers in the 60’s eschewing standard concert set ups and creating pieces for an orchestra seated around a circular room to create a fully immersive ‘sound world’ experience. And it continues strong to this day: Danny Brown’s new album Old presents a rapper who’s own voice becomes as versatile and pitched as a violin. Leaping up and down lines, bouncing off the beats with a succinct percussive sense and building intensity like a Coltrane solo, Danny Brown proves himself, like many of his peers (El-P, Killer Mike and Kool A.D.) to be ahead of the game musically – we don’t even have notation capable of capturing the musical intricacies of these verses. Listening to Danny Brown rap is akin to entering a hectic, new sonic environment, full of interesting new sonorities, colors and timbers to engage with.

This isn’t to say I’m about to burn my College’s pianos to the ground, dump my scores in the river and preach the musical virtue of avant-garde hip hop and electronica to my teachers. There is, I believe, always a time and a place for each kind of music, and though it may be relegated to the obscure and snobby, I still love the weird, pioneering and daring techniques modern composers of Art Music take to make innovative and challenging music. But I also love how this has influenced the world over in unexpected ways. Even when I’m head-bobbing in a grungy basement to that crunchy, dirty new single, I’m thanking that old homie Arnold Schoenberg and all his disciples for, in the face of all the obstacles, having the balls to ask “why not?” It’s paid off in ways he nor anyway could have imagined: a world of new and exciting music, across the spectrum.

Season	Categories	Published
MP00	Music	Apr 03, 2013

Around this time every year, as the weather warms and the burden of spring classes starts to take its toll, the bougie and largely complacent population of my small liberal arts college finds a socially charged catalyst to ignite a campus-wide discussion on “uncomfortable” topics. Don’t take my tone as disparaging – often times, these conversations have promoted crucial, interesting and eye-opening revelations, strengthening our student body as a whole as we learn more about each other, our commonalities and our differences. This year, however, the catalyst and the ensuing debate left much to be desired: after hiring Chance the Rapper for our spring concert, a controversy flared over his use of the word “faggot” in one of his more widely known hits (“Favorite Song”). Again, this isn’t to dismiss the concerns and anxieties of the student body – the college has an obligation to respond to cultural currents and its not unreasonable to expect our entertainment committee to pick a performer that appropriately embodies our mutually shared political and social attitudes. But at the end of the day, as I absorbed the dialogue and reflected on the situation, I couldn’t help feel like it all boiled down to a largely privileged set of undergraduates trying to tell a rapper what he could and could not say.

Rap is often pretty confrontational in nature. The lyrics confront us, the beat confronts us, and if the rapper’s anyone worth listening to, the flow and energy confront us, too. This is what excites me so much about my favorite rappers, and it’s where I feel, despite the enormous historical, cultural and intellectual chasm, that the musical philosophy of Theodor Adorno manifests in the contemporary era. Adorno is one of the pillars of “critical theory”, that esoteric branch of political philosophy that seeks to redeem and revitalize Marxism for modern times (namely, after the failure of the communist project in Russia). Adorno’s body of work is enormous and his intellectual contributions to the Western canon are profound. But he interests me most for his work dedicated to music. Adorno styled himself a sort of philosophical music critic, and sought to understand the music of his era (early 20^th century art music) in terms of its reflection on society, on the brutality of bourgeoisie domination (it’s Marxism, remember) and the ways music can awaken and shape society. For Adorno, powerful atonal music, full of dissonance and uncomfortable moments, could awaken its audience to the brutality and contradictions of the world around them. Such music was said to have a critical stance towards society. In other words, harmony and consonance, those beloved tools of Bach and Mozart, were bourgeoisie trifles. Dissonance and discord are the weapons of a Marxist utopia.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, he limited this analysis to the music of privileged bourgeoisie white men, composers like Schoenberg and his disciples. He reviled “light” music, the sort of tunes one would hear on the radio – this music was according to Adorno “illusory”, and served only to mask the ways in which capitalism dominates our lives. Famously, and perhaps tragically, he had a special hatred for Jazz. Jazz, he argued, pretended to have a critical stance, but was too rigid in form and predictability to actually function the way Schoenberg’s music did. Critics of Adorno have responded to his revulsion of jazz in a number of ways. Some argue he was too immersed in classical music to take jazz on its own terms. Others contend what he meant by jazz was that dweeby, awful knock-off music early century Germans thought was jazz (cf. the operetta “Johnny’s Jazz Band” for a real bizarre treat). And of course, there’s always that racial issue as well. But whatever his motivations, Adorno missed out big: jazz can be (and often is) as critical as the most discordant, ear-shattering atonal works. And so, I argue, can hip-hop, especially the music being made today by rising and established stars such as Danny Brown, Schoolboy Q, Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike – even Ab Soul on a good day. Adorno would probably have reacted with shock and abhorrence at the sound of this music. But, just as with jazz, he would have missed the big picture.

Rap music is primed to reveal the contradictions of capitalist domination and unveil the myriad of ways in which we oppress one another, even though it involves lyrics. Adorno felt that vocal music faced an uphill battle to be critical because it was too representational: in order for music to reveal the contradictions of capitalism, he argued, it had to deny all representational semblance, and be the sonic equivalent of abstraction for the visual arts. Vocal music is by default expressive and representational, so how can it fulfill this criteria? The lyrics of rap however are more than merely representational. The medium is relevant: they’re not singing or talking, they’re rapping, a method of musical delivery than over the recent decades has confirmed in its subject matter an intimate, personal quality that does more than deliver words – rap delivers the truth of structural conditions and the forces that have shaped the rapper’s own life. A soprano singing an aria does her best to imbue the libretto with as much musical and personal expressive force as she can, but when Danny Brown delivers a verse he’s sending out the essence of Danny Brown. He’s not just representing, he’s presenting, and what’s he’s presenting are the structural forces and societal limits that left him to deal drugs, fight thugs on the way to buy groceries and yearn to escape his home town.

Adorno says that critical music jars the listener: an audience to an atonal string quartet yearns for pleasing consonances, the II-V-I resolutions of tonal harmony, but they get only unresolved dissonance. This tension, Adorno claims, awakens them to the ways in which bourgeoisie domination creates contradictions and brutal, unresolved societal dissonances. Underground (and increasingly, mainstream) rap often has the same function: you might want to hear about love, friendship, concord and all the other pleasing consequences of bourgeoisie indulgence. But Schoolboy Q shows you a perverted notion of what wealth and luxury are, outside the typical middle class framework. Ab Soul challenges the authoritative forces we take for granted around us constantly (if you can take him seriously, which I recommend at least trying). Danny Brown reminds us, in the age when hip hop artists insist on rapping about their cars, jewels and women, the bleakness and hopelessness he barely escaped to be on a stage (check out “Fields” and “Scrap or Die” for the most raw, revolutionary tracks on his acclaimed album XXX). And Chance the Rapper in “Favorite Song” reminds us of the societal conditions than tolerate and often condone homophobic, ultra-masculine attitudes. Middleclass bourgeoisie audience may not like any of this – but that’s the damn point. We live in a society rife with contradictions, and we need music that constantly reminds us that these contradictions exist and aren’t improving anytime soon, especially if we refuse to let those on the lesser end of these contradictions tell us about their lives themselves, no matter what words they use.

So would Adorno get down to Bruiser Brigade and dip to “Druggies wit Hoes”? Definitely not – the great irony of his work is the privilege he accords to the bourgeoisie intellectual tradition at the expense of the cultures and aesthetics he sought to redeem through Marxism. But that’s okay: his message resonates across the decades, down into the grungy underground clubs where my favorite rappers got their starts. Rap music shouldn’t be about you hearing what you want to hear, what affirms your comfortable existence. It’s about other people’s voices, other people’s experiences, manifested hopefully in the grimiest, dirtiest, most musically exciting ways. Does this mean when the proletariat finally seizes the means of production, they’ll be blasting not Schoenberg’s atonal opera but “Collard Greens”? I wouldn’t be mad. ▩

Mangoprism

Season 08

scohenberg

Modern ‘Art’ Music and its Indie Compatriots

Adorno: Critical Theorist or Based God?

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