Toward a New Synthesis We don

Toward a
New Synthesis

by Dusan Bogdanovic

We don’t understand music, it understands us.
Theodor Adorno, Beethoven

PART I    A Historical Synopsis
PART II   The Influence of Ethnic Music
PART III  Historical Awareness and Conservation

PART IV Scientific Development and Exploration
PART V Popular Idioms and Communications Media
CONCLUSION

PART I

Confusing, complex, fragmented, explosive, ever changing yet frightfully static, the present age lays claim to being the most revolutionary in the history of mankind. The potential for enlightenment and technological and social utopia coexist with an undeniable limitation – poverty, both physical and mental – which reduces the human being to an impotent and insignificant statistic. This indeed is our world, not in the mind but in reality.

Music and the arts in general attest to this: not only are they vehicles for expressing this reality but also their very fabric reflects it. Even the terms artist, craftsman, businessman, amateur, popular and "high" culture, valuable and worthless, successful, hit, masterpiece, original and fake no longer signify the coherence and unity of the reality that was once taken for granted; all of these terms are now interchangeable according to the rules of a particular world.

While serialism has found its ideology and justification in blending with science, the minimalist movement finds its credo in liberation of the individual through impersonal ritual and through deconstructed ethnic music. Popular music, on the other hand, because of its easy marketability through the media, has come to be based entirely on formula and on satisfying the lowest common denominator. These two extremes – elitist (quasi-scientific) contemporary music and mass-produced, formulabased pop and rock muzak – both show the same symptoms: alienation, narrow or "tunnel" vision, and the hypertrophy of one level of consciousness at the expense of others. The result is a caricature of human fragmentation – brain with no body, body with no brain – the isolated self as opposed to the collective with no individual identity, and so on.

A Historical Synopsis

Looked at from the socioeconomic perspective, art in its original syncretic form was a part of tribal life, integrated into the whole, and the musician’s function was clearly defined by ritual and custom. The musician, as soothsayer, prophet, and supernatural being, was able to communicate the psychical, the divine, to bring people together on the collective, unconscious level. His role, like the shaman’s, was as the catalyst for a profound experience of collective reconnection with the oneness of being. In other words, music had the same function as religion (from lat. religare, to tie back).

This tribal or magical structure of consciousness was emotive, instinctual, characterized by the sense of timelessness and spacelessness. The individual and the group were governed by social customs and laws that did not leave much freedom of choice or room for a highly differentiated sense of self. The performer-improviser worked within orally transmitted archetypal musical forms, based on elaborate systems of patterns. Musically speaking, the emphasis was on rhythm, cyclical form (derived from natural periodicity), pentatonic and mode-based melody.

Ancient Greece brought forth social hierarchization and extreme economic polarity, in which the musician became an outcast, untouchable, but paradoxically retained his supernatural role in ritual and religion. At this point in history, the hero myth prevailed and indicated the birth of an independent ego against the background of the collective unconscious. At the same time, because of music’s appeal to the magical in man, the priestly and ruling casts relied strongly on music, which became a permanent fixture in religious ritual.

Thus, as social differentiation progressed, music fractured into sacred and secular. The two faces of music were created: the Apollonian, always in search of balance and harmony, resulting in a long line of aesthetic development – from the Pythagorean music of the spheres to Bach’s crystallization of the tonal system and polyphonic forms to the dream of total serialism in the post-Webern period – but also serving as a psychological pacifier allied with existing power structures; and the Dionysian, subversive, relying on the elemental strength of folk and popular idioms, seeking to express the violence and frustration of the oppressed (from Dionysian ecstatic cults in Greece and Rome to the eruption of popular music in contemporary blues, jazz, and rock).

The music of the Middle Ages was still a blend of sacred and secular music. The jongleur was a vagabond, equally comfortable at village festivities and in court; it would take further social differentiation (in the fourteenth century) to distinguish his role as either court or street musician. Yet before this time there was no specialization. The musician was a generalist: performer, improviser, and composer in one. With the advent of notation and an increasing use of instrumental groups in both church and court, the distancing and isolation of a musical elite took place hand in hand with other developments.

The Renaissance, which perhaps is paralleled only by the present in its revolutionary sentiment, marked a divisive line between non perspectival and perspectival structures of consciousness. The discovery of perspective not only led the visual arts to a new understanding and perception of reality but indicated a fundamental mutation in all aspects of the psychosocial fabric. The emphasis was on the rational rather than on the magical or mythical; on the individual rather than on the collective; on ego identity rather than on a collectively constituted unconscious.

In music, the refinement and static quality of the modal system, as well as the rhythmic flexibility and metric freedom, found in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, became focused and coherently stylized during the Renaissance of the sixteenth century. The idiosyncrasies of particular modes were sacrificed to produce a more uniform major-minor system: a scale became a model to be transposed onto any degree of a semitone-divided octave. Thus, a coherent hierarchical system was established simultaneously with the mutation of consciousness from mythical to rational. At this point, the musician became a domestique, a paid servant with a fixed position in the feudal court. Even though the connections between court and popular music did not dissolve completely, the role of musicians in each became distinctly different: minstrels remained musicians of the street, drawing their inspiration from popular song, while court musicians became an integrative part of the religious feudal elite, glorifying the feudal master and writing music on command. Thus, a musician caste was established that, in the course of time, became highly hierarchical and differentiated.

In the Baroque period, the musician was primarily a craftsman; his ties to folk and popular music are seen in his improvisational practices, in his double role of performer and composer, and in his lack of social luster. The contrapuntal and harmonic rules were observed (with rare exceptions), and the formal structure reflected, in its cohesion and balance, the monolithic buildings of religious and social institutions. With the advent of the printing press and an increasing reliance on written rather than on improvised music, the roles of interpreter and composer became differentiated, and a road to narrow specialization was paved.

The downfall of feudalism and the takeover of economic and social power by the bourgeoisie brought countless transformations in every aspect of musical life. The court palace, for example, was replaced by the concert hall, thus abandoning the intimacy of the chamber music setting for the monumentality of symphonic music. Whereas chamber music in the feudal setting represented the sheltered subjectivity of an elect few, the concert hall symphony proclaimed the newly acquired power of the bourgeoisie, in which the previously hidden individual suddenly became the focus.

The building of concert halls as unique places of musical representation had a twofold effect: the separation of the musician and musical experience from everyday life and the growing perception of music as a valuable object to be sold. Whereas in the feudal system the musicianservant sold his services exclusively to a master, in early capitalism he became an independent agent, selling his work to various clients. Between being integrated into the totality of tribal life and being given an autonomous, isolated position in the bourgeois system, there is a chasm, and both music and musicians reflect this. The ensuing monologue in music up to the twentieth century spoke of that emancipation and autonomous development on the one hand and of increasing alienation and social dysfunctionality on the other. The final stage of this line of development is familiar: music written and listened to by musicians in empty concert halls.

The new formal archetypes of Classical and Romantic music were based on the psychosocial transformations of preceding periods: the formal growth of polyphonic architecture through the development of one musical thought (the fugue) was replaced by confrontation of contrasting thoughts (the sonata). The Baroque aesthetics of "self-generating" form based primarily on the seamless development of one or more interrelated motifs (a line that can be traced from the Renaissance ricercar, to fugue, to monothematic Haydn sonatas, to the twentieth-century serial and to some extent minimalist forms) was transformed through increasingly polarized harmonic and melodic material, as in the treatment of the sonata by Beethoven and by composers of the Romantic period. This form, in contrast to Baroque polyphonic form, relied on the contrast, confrontation, and dramatic resolution of the dialectic inherent in the material.

As the music (and musician) lost its integration with the totality of social life (as in ritual, ceremony, and festival), it assumed a new autonomous and multifunctional role. Because of the individual composer’s increasing freedom from the formal archetype, music became, potentially, an exposed privacy and therefore a psychosocial way of emphasizing one’s ego identity to an extent never dreamed of in previous periods. If the older forms and styles gave the individual the status of a participant in the universal, the newer gave him the status of the universal itself. In other words, the individual had the power to recreate the world.

While the musician-shaman and musician-servant had to assume rigid social roles and accept aesthetic postulates, the increasingly independent musician of the Classical, Romantic, and contemporary periods became the center and focus of artistic social life: the expression of creative and personal idiosyncrasies not only became possible but was an essential ingredient of this new role.

The birth of the "star," with all its economic and psychosocial implications, can be traced to the mid–nineteenth century. Two events were of fundamental importance: in 1830 Liszt played compositions of other composers in concert, thereby giving the music repertory a spatial dimension; and in 1829 Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach, thereby giving the repertory a temporal dimension. These events caused an aesthetic and economic upheaval: the separate functions of the interpreter and the composer became firmly established; an expanded musical universe was created that included music from various regions and times.

Economically speaking, a completely new market of clients interested in music from the past was created, transforming both the "star" and the music into a valuable object akin to capital stock. The classical music market today is a direct outcome of this, and if one could compare the masterpieces of the past to living fossils, the classical "stars" could be compared to traveling curators. Never before in the history of music have living composers had as much competition from dead ones as they do today: a famous masterpiece by a famous composer, performed by a famous interpreter, is the highest-yield, lowest-risk stock.

As the power of the aristocracy faded, the patrons, who in earlier times commissioned pieces from composers, were replaced in the nineteenth century by publishers, by the general public, and by the amateur market. With this change, Western classical music was dethroned as the only musical art money could buy, and the doors were symbolically and literally opened to other kinds of musical venture.

Popular music, for example, was brought out of obscurity and into the concert hall mainly through cabaret, a variety of caf’ conc’ (cafe concert), which gave popular music a stable outlet from the mid–nineteenth century onward. Whether we consider the caf’ conc’ of Europe or club performances in the United States, the genealogy of the pop star is primarily connected to the oppressed and to those racially or economically discriminated against. Since popular music could not depend on support from the rich and sophisticated as classical music did, it relied on ordinary men and women and their purchasing power. Because of the popular song’s intrinsic simplicity and its appeal to the artistically unsophisticated, a new market for musical representation of unprecedented dimensions and power was created. The pop star not only embodied the musical tastes of the underprivileged but also became a symbol of social and economic success; he or she became one of the groups who "made it." Ironically, the symbol of the pop star simultaneously served another role, that of social pacifier: frustration – helplessness and powerlessness – could be infinitely rationalized and sublimated through the image of a socially successful equal.

If the Classical period of Western art music liberated the musician from his preordained social role in the hierarchical world of feudalism, the Romantic era strengthened this process further: the musician’s role as an individualistic and original spirit which had been a new possibility, became an exigency. It is mainly from this era that the image of a suffering, misunderstood genius comes. In other words, the totality of the individual became the exclusive focus of music. The same process that had served to liberate the musician became an instrument of his alienation. The logic of this process can be seen in the historical transformation of the musician’s role and of musical practices in the social context and in the genealogy of musical processes and structures. Several distinct lines of development follow from the Romantic period to today: an increasing complexity of the elements and overall form of music; an integration of spatially (diverse ethnic sources) and temporally (diverse periods) different musical worlds; a replacement of natural frames of reference with artificial or scientific ones; and an increasing elasticity of musical expression.

The rhythmic profile was refined horizontally, to include diverse subdivisions, and vertically, to include complex superpositions: the beat was no longer the carrier of the rhythmic pulse but only a reference in the general flow. Melody and harmony followed the emancipation of dissonance in horizontal and vertical aspects. The natural hierarchy of the overtone series was replaced by an artificial, relative universe (from drone to modal to major-minor to extended tonal to serial). Similarly, there was a shift from cyclical and periodic forms to aperiodic and nonarchetypal forms.

Profound psychological changes took place at the same time: if the archetypal form and overtone-based natural hierarchy gave a confining but secure place to the premodern individual, the newly constructed relative universe gave him a limitless but isolating freedom. This freedom resulted primarily from a heroic effort of the intellect, which subsequently became a hallmark of twentieth century music.

Historically speaking, every period’s particular psychosocial reality is manifested in the idiosyncrasies of its musical structures and processes: a strong rhythmic pulse coupled with the pentatonic and modal systems of tribal (folk) music reflected a collective, rather than an individual, consciousness; the tonal system combined with the unified but limited rhythmic profile of Western art music before the twentieth century reflected an increasingly individualistic emotional and intellectual reality; the atonal, aperiodic, free-pulsating music of the contemporary era points to two extremes: at one end, a highly refined but narrowly focused individual consciousness and, at the other, a quasi-scientific, ego-free and thus impersonal, consciousness.

PART II
Orientations
If the nineteenth century planted the seeds of spatial and temporal expansion, the twentieth century brought this potentiality to full fruition. A multitude of orientations appeared, which could be roughly classified as follows:
• The influence of ethnic music
• Historical awareness and conservation
• Scientific development and experimentation
• The explosion of popular idioms and development of communications media.

The Influence of Ethnic Music
Ethnic music has in general been the source of composed music. Although diverse levels of stylization and abstraction of folk elements have characterized different periods, the fundamentals of musical style can usually be traced to ethnic music. At its most particular, folk music is a tradition limited to a certain region and people; at its most universal, a powerful source for synthesis in an international context. West European folk music (and to a lesser extent, that of the Mediterranean region) has been the principal source for Western art music. The history of Western art music is characterized by a process of refinement and complexification, which despite independence and isolation, has often undergone profound transformation through the influence of folk music. One could even argue that most of music history oscillates between the particularity of the folk element and the universality of its stylization.

Although the influence of folk music has been substantial throughout history, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the great syntheses of folk and art music took place: I refer primarily to Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ohana, Olivier Messiaen, and others in contemporary classical music, as well as to a large number of blues and jazz musicians. Debussy’s music clearly was influenced by oriental music; his use of quartal harmony, pentatonicism, and modality refer to Indonesian gamelan and Chinese folk music. Messiaen’s Promethean synthesis of Indian raag and occidental systems inspired many later developments, although none that match the strength and coherence of his creation. As Stravinsky and Bartók uncovered the powerful rhythmic and melodic structures of east European folk music, such jazz greats as Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Don Ellis, John Coltrane, and others accomplished various syntheses of African and other kinds of music, while reintroducing the art of improvisation into the creative process.

Although improvisation was an integral part of musical practices from folk to Renaissance to Baroque, as role specialization increased, improvisation gradually lost its place. According to Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence, irreversible processes such as perception and semireversible processes such as sensorimotor systems belong to older psychophysical layers of consciousness while reversible processes such as operational thinking belong to newer layers. It is not surprising therefore, that most folk music relies strongly on improvisational practices, especially since such music is based mostly on oral, rather than written, tradition. Both irreversible and reversible processes play major roles in both improvised and composed music. A fundamental difference, however, is that while improvisation occurs irreversibly, the compositional process has the possibility of reversibility. In other words, composition is "frozen in time," permitting control of the horizontal, vertical, and overall formal aspects of a piece, while improvisation relies mainly on the inspiration and chance of the moment. Yet both improvisation and composition are
based on unified and elaborate musical systems.

The twentieth century, therefore, reintroduced the vitality of the folk idiom and improvisational practice into musical reality. Psychologically speaking, this reintroduction caused an eruption of older layers of consciousness (magical and mythical) from beneath carefully guarded rational consciousness. A whole generation of composers and improvisers has been experimenting with the integration of these musical universes in various practices such as aleatoric operations, free jazz, and others.

Part III
Historical Awareness and Conservation
As the awareness and inclusion of diverse kinds of ethnic music expanded the musical universe spatially, it simultaneously opened up the temporal dimension as well. The creations of older layers of consciousness not only became available for synthesis with contemporary idioms but also developed a life of their own; this explains the coexistence of the multitudes of musical languages today. The revival of previous periods of Western art music in their totality hand in hand with the revealing of the world’s folklore in its entirety has had two distinctly different functions: 1) it has created a spatially and temporally transparent musical universe, and 2) it has set in motion a conservative and reactionary process, resulting in a creative stasis and a museumlike industry.

These two functions are perhaps symptomatic of two opposite tendencies at work throughout human history: exploration and openness, and preservation and enclosure. While the first tendency leads to a multiperspectival awareness and subsequent integration of the world, the other tendency emphasizes particularity as an end in itself, and in its exclusive reliance on the known, limits itself to a secure but isolated place. The lack of education and openness, inflexibility in the music industry, and isolation and narrowness in the contemporary classical and jazz idioms are three main reasons for the present situation. All three factors can be traced to a complex interplay of psychosocial and economic processes, which have paradoxically given the individual today an unprecedented potential for spatial and temporal freedom. However, the revealed wealth of the world’s folklore and of past musical periods is most often used not as inspiration for new syntheses but as reactionary formulae for producing more musical (or unmusical) objects.

Part IV
Scientific Development and Exploration
Refinement and increasing complexity in contemporary music has happened simultaneously with role specialization and the predominance of rational thought over other structures of consciousness. As mentioned earlier, since the Renaissance, a process of perspectivization has created an upheaval in our psychosocial reality, bringing with it a growing reliance on science and on rationality in general. Art, with its potential to express the totality of existence and thus all the phylogenetically inherited layers, has become a way of expressing rational consciousness at the expense of other structures. Music, which has always been a marriage between reason and feeling, pretends either to emulate science or to borrow its subject and method from it.

Finally, by entirely replacing natural frames of reference (such as the overtone series) with artificial ones, the individual has been literally and symbolically cut off from the totality of human experience and consequently has created music in his own fragmented image. This intellectual hypertrophy is also responsible for creating a vacuum that has eagerly been filled by music exclusively based on older layers of consciousness. Minimalism, for example, through its use of gradual transformation based on African (Steve Reich) or Indian (Philip Glass, Terry Riley) ethnic music has brought back the collective archaic consciousness. Much of popular music, even if it is based on industrial cliché, satisfies the need for expressing oneself physically and emotionally.

Thus fragmented, music today reflects, on the negative side, the deep psychosocial schism, and on the positive side, the coexistence of multitudes of spatial and temporal realities. It is not that the promise of the future lies in an indiscriminate synthesis of all these universes (as postmodernist theorists would like us to think) but that the human totality is rediscovered as an integration of both inherited and newly created layers. Accepting who we are will not be an exercise in either complete limitation or in complete freedom. Intellect, similarly, rather than creating incommunicable worlds, will assume the role of coordinator and integrator and not remain an end in itself. If this integration becomes possible, the bridge between the collective and the individual, the particular and the universal, can be rebuilt to create a world aware of both history and the present, here and elsewhere.

Part V
Popular Idioms and Communications Media
The explosion of popular music in the twentieth century has been partly due to the fading power of the aristocracy, along with the increasing power of the middle class; the change in the symbolic and economic value of music and its representation, and the development of the media of communication and of sound recording, or music reproduction by repetition. As mentioned earlier, the invention of the "star" system happened simultaneously with the expansion of the market and the transformation of both music and musician into objects of value. If the first revolutionaries of blues and rock (such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, etc.) broke down the psychosocial barriers of their time, their subsequent fetishism and marketability created a space that would be filled by numerous clones and imitators. In the process, the image of these musicians became such a powerful marketing tool (as well as a psychosocial symbol) that a selfperpetuating "star industry" was created, and music became largely a marginal phenomenon (see work by Theodor Adorno).

It was in this way that the new role of “amateur” star came into being. As society further fragmented into public and private spheres, the neurotic split became deeper; the individual with no autonomy could project his needs onto the manufactured image of the "star," with its invented public life. A simulation, within a simulation, within a simulation.

If pop music’s aesthetic merit is marginal, its psychosocial implications are fundamentally important: its reliance on the basic (older) structures of consciousness serves not only an integrative function but a fragmenting one as well. By integrating the powerless and isolated individual into a fictional life of fulfillment, it robs him of his own creativity and life potential, offering him an ersatz life instead. In other words, what is wrong is not the commercial music itself (in an open music market there should be enough space for all levels and tastes) but the extent of its manipulative power. If contemporary classical and jazz music have something to learn from pop music, it is not to emulate its business strategies (one manipulation equals another) but to strive for a balanced use of psychophysical layers.

One final factor has been crucial in creating the present situation: the almost complete replacement of the concert, as musical representation, by sound recording as repetitive reproduction. Originally, role of recording was that of conservation, not repetition; Edison enumerated possible uses of the phonograph: to conserve memorable speeches and theatrical performances in the public domain, and to conserve the last words of a dying family member or the words of a faraway lover, in the private. It was not until 1898 that the commercial use of the phonograph was discovered. Once understood, the commercial potential of sound recording was exploited to its fullest, thereby creating an upheaval in both our perception and practice of music. The principal transformation took place in pop music: the sound recording, which was originally only an auxiliary of the concert, became the main product. In the process, the unique musical event (the concert) became "windowshopping" for the copy (the sound recording). This victory of the copy over the original is far-reaching in many ways: the musician in live concert is measured against his recording; the recording and its production become the focus of the investor; and finally, the public is replaced by the individual listener. Instead of a living process, music becomes a music-object to be stocked and consumed in solitude. An industry based on serial repetition has therefore produced a new set of values that reflect a statistical reality: the quantity of musicobjects sold defines the value of music. There lies the present axiological confusion, resulting in a total relativizing of values. Such terms as professional and amateur, artist and dilettante, and masterpiece and kitsch become synonyms, thus creating multitudes of both genuine and artificial realities.

Conclusion
If the twentieth century reveals the potential for unprecedented spatial and temporal integration, it also brings with it extreme fragmentation and incoherence. Instead of the balanced integration of psychophysical layers, the overspecialization and hypertrophy of one level at the expense of others is the rule rather than the exception. The result, at one extreme, is complexity, refinement, and the narrowness of a deficient rational consciousness; and at the other, simplification of reality, incoherence, ahistoricity, and reliance on the lowest common denominator and on magical and mythical consciousness. What is mistakenly interpreted as freedom in the domain of mental consciousness is actually the confinement of an isolated intelligentsia, away from the strong roots of the physical, the emotional, and the collective. The exclusive use of older structures, however, relies on the lulling power of the collective unconscious and does not acknowledge the individual’s uniqueness and history, without which the birth of a new multilayered, multiperspectival world remains an abstraction.

The problem of balancing the universal and the particular today becomes a question of survival: as much as an open consciousness in the "here and now" is needed, a historical, evolutionary dimension is also indispensable if a meaningful and coherent reality is to be lived – otherwise, life is only a succession of unconnected moment realities. In denying the particular, one is forced to rely only on older layers of consciousness; in denying the universal, one must rely only on newer layers.

Solutions can be found through the balanced integration of phylogenetically and historically inherited psychophysical layers; through a flexible concept of self, permitting openness and integration; and through an equally flexible concept of profession, permitting a wide range of activities in the context of re-creation and spontaneity. A new spatially and temporally integrated individual might then emerge, who through both freedom and limitation would participate in an awakening of mankind as a "single, living and self-aware entity."