September 2020 Print

By Andrew Childs

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838: An Address [Harvard Divinity School]

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882: The Merry Science

“The philosopher has declared: The principle of faith is immanent; the believer has added: This principle is God; and the theologian draws the conclusion: God is immanent in man.”—Pope St. Pius X, 1907: Pascendi Dominici Gregis

“Who cares if you listen?”—Milton Babbitt, High Fidelity, VIII, no. 2 (February 1958)

In 1907, Pope St. Pius X described Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies,” revealing both its danger, and its elusiveness. Ideas resembling or built upon a single defined heresy have proven dangerous enough throughout history, but the Saint exposed Modernism as a black hole of heresy, a realm error so dense that no light of truth can escape. Modernism is the towering achievement of the diabolical mind: no human mind can resist or defeat it. Recognition and avoidance provide the only possible defenses.

Most people make catastrophic choices voluntarily, compelled by pride. No choice ranks higher on the scale of catastrophe than the rejection of God, and the devil has worked tirelessly throughout history to convince people to deny God through the promise of a personal divinity. The two positions in the epigraphs above represent the logical end of humanist philosophy: man is God, and God is dead. With these two conditions established, man can finally realize his omnipotence. He spreads his wings to soar—and falls into the Modernist abyss.

What does this mean for art? What manner of music does a god compose? Modernism manifests itself musically most obviously in the realm of academic High Art music—more on this below—but the devil will use any means possible, good or bad, to bring about our ruin. The present discussion will consider first the relationship that has always existed between various genres and styles of music, and then how, after the dawn of Modernism, obvious yet complimentary differences in various types of music became hard divisions designed to force listeners away from sustaining cultural good, and accustom them to music either lacking in substance, or outright morally dangerous.

Picture a Cartesian graph where the horizontal axis moves left to right from BAD to GOOD, and the vertical axis moves bottom to top from LOW to HIGH. Though good and bad certainly involve matters of taste, before the 20th century, the assessment of art involved recognized objective standards; transcendental absolutes, now shunned as insensitive or non-inclusive, had not yet fallen out of favor. Low and high relate to sophistication and purpose; both can be either good or bad based on aesthetics, philosophy, and morality.

Music in the upper right quadrant qualifies as high/good. No need to linger here at the moment; this is the music you know you should listen to. Recall that music deals very specifically with the relationship of intellect and emotion. God wants to use emotions to draw souls higher, through the intellect, to Heaven; the Devil wants to use emotions to debase the intellect, subjecting it to animal nature, leading souls to hell. The Devil does not want us to have access to cultural friends of real character who speak real comfort to real problems. He works hard to discredit substantial culture—subjecting it to ridicule as stodgy, prudish, outdated, even prideful—because he knows that keeping company with great art provides real consolation and logically results in a turning toward God.

The artist in the unsavory low/bad corner of the cultural world uses art expressed purposefully provocatively, violently, shockingly, and loudly to encourage thoughts, words, and deeds specifically recognizable as sinful. The more sexually explicit, graphically violent, and socially unacceptable the better. No need to linger here; this is the music you know you shouldn’t listen to. Its appeal—and we can never forget the very real appeal of excess and sin—merits separate consideration. Like everything below the x axis, this music lacks cultural nutrition, but unlike the musical neighbors to the right, this music contains moral poison.

Good fences, Robert Frost posits, make good neighbors. Unfortunately, no cultural fence exists between good and bad art, and the employment on the part both of low/bad and low/good composers of exactly the same musical materials to entertain or entice proves immensely frustrating. On the good side of the line—some of it very, very close to the line—lies, in very general terms, Pop music and Folk music. Sentimental appeal rather than technical substance drives this music. Pop music is cultural candy, fast food which never loses its appeal, sung by fast, but unfortunately false cultural friends: fast in that most popular music deals with universal but superficial emotional issues, false in that this sentimentality creates an intellectual softness which makes appeals to more sinister issues—isolation, generational discord, sexual liberation—easier to believe. Folk music is certainly good and inarguably necessary, but just as sentimental as pop music. It merits endorsement because it makes a legitimate claim to tradition, speaks to less overtly questionable themes, and allows for direct participation. Folk music works beautifully as a means—to gain literacy, as entertainment, as a connection to cultural traditions, and as a technical foundation required to appreciate masterworks—but not a cultural end. We do not honor folk music by pretending that it has more cultural horsepower than it does, and when the Modernist attack against music came from the lofty left, many chose to remain below rather than fight for the right. While prudently avoiding both elevated sinister pride and obvious filth, however, this choice deprives the listener of the necessary and ennobling experiences that lie above.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
                    —W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Modernism denies the supernatural, certainly as a reality and the foundation of Faith, but also as manifested in any system or pursuit founded on anything remotely resembling a Divinely instituted hierarchy. The center of music fell apart as the result of conflicting forces and unsustainable stylistic pressures. One force was populism, a direct attack on the social order of Christendom. Aristocratic artistic patrons not only provided security, but a guarantee of quality. When popular demand overtook artistic patronage, artists previously protected by patrons had to submit to forces of trend and the changing consumer tastes. Though the 19th century witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of musical masterworks, composers increasingly began to explore extremes in terms of scale, novelty, scandalous and sensational themes, and technical complexity as a way to compete for audiences. Both audiences and artists had a breaking point. As listeners began to resist the increasing demands of scale and complexity, artists either acquiesced to public demand for popular forms, generally more accessible, or they continued to circle upward, oblivious to any direction from below, unconcerned that few could or would care to hear what they wrote. As for accessibility—essentially communication between the artist and the audience—composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, a preeminent champion of the Modernist musical cause stated flatly “A whore is very accessible. In fact, she is probably the ultimate definition of accessibility.” Comprehensibility for the Modernist had become prostitution.

The music in this upper left quadrant is unquestionably high: phenomenally sophisticated, requiring great skill, highly exclusive—properly meaningful only to the ‘initiated’—and almost always a product of the Academy. Only composers with tenure, it seems, can afford to write music no one wants to listen to; Milton Babbitt, an unquestioned Dean of Modernist music proudly declared as much. In the article referenced above, Babbitt claimed that institutes of higher learning had an obligation to provide composers of ‘New’ music a safe haven, just as they would those who conduct scientific research. This intellectual patronage would guarantee that the composer experimenting with the theoretical or obtuse could do so free from any traditional aesthetic constraints or audience approval. Experiment they did! Composers Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg formed the Second Viennese School, producing mathematically complex “Serial” or “Twelve-tone” explorations in atonality, a system which purposefully avoided recognizable tonal centers or standard melodic shapes. American John Cage, more a performance artist working in the medium of sound than a composer, conducted clever sound experiments involving, among others, multiple radios, fish tanks, a piano eating (or force-fed) hay, and the ultimate Modernist expression of music, his immortal “4:33,” precisely (or not…) four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Minimalism, a third strand of musical Modernism, purposefully says as little as possible, but does so for a very long time. Philip Glass could provide your lifetime allowance of this, ironically in a very short period of time. Many others exist; they all stay on-script.

Arnold Schoenberg. Austrian-born composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. One of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was an innovator in atonality, as well as developing the twelve-tone technique, a compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Modernist music is bad in that it destroys rather than builds on that which preceded it, and it makes a direct appeal to pride above all else, certainly aesthetics. It excludes rather than includes, by utilizing an alienating though structurally and mathematically “perfect” system of tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic organization with no recognizable connection to accepted, comprehensible aesthetic standards. Supporters will argue that progress has always seemed initially controversial, and that the uninitiated lack the intelligence or sophistication to understand, thus piquing curiosity and pride. How, precisely, did this come about? Perhaps not precisely at all, but as a matter of degree, of ultimate limits tested, and finally found. The gods of the 19th century composed mountains of sound, pushing the limits of man, machine, and audience stamina to a breaking point. The music of Wagner, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Verdi, Puccini, and Mahler give the listener the giddy and overwhelming sense that he could experience nothing greater: Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Liebestod (Birgit Nielsen, of course); Bruckner’s 7th; Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration”; the first act of Puccini’s “La Bohème” (or last act of “Turandot”); the finale of Mahler’s 2nd (“Resurrection”), or 8th (“Symphony of a Thousand”). The mind boggles at the scale; the heart swells to the point of breaking…and then, what can possibly follow? The Modernist proposes to fix the broken heart by cutting it out completely; what remains is neither angelic nor human, but monstrous.

The Modernist artist, like every revolutionary, congratulates himself for building something new, while in fact merely wrecking something old. Iconoclasm does not equal progress, and aesthetics relate to unchangeable nature, not merely technical trend: we like things that taste good, and reject things that taste awful; we like things that feel pleasurable, and reject things that feel painful; we enjoy sounds that sound beautiful, and…feel proud of our intelligence when we pretend to like Stockhausen! The Modernist denial of the supernatural by extension means the denial of truth in an absolute sense, a knowable truth to which we must submit by avoiding sin (the existence of which the Modernist certainly rejects), and by further extension the denial of natural law, shepherd of artistic form. Aesthetics for the Modernist—or morality—represent personal choice, and nothing else, and the traditionally or recognizably lovely becomes an object of derision. The Godless intellectual has made intellectuality suspect through pride; the Devil and our fallen nature, manifest in intellectual laziness, convinces us to remain in cultural company ultimately beneath us. We must as always endeavor to come up higher, defying the synthesis of all error, striving in all things, music included, to embrace the highest expressions of truth.