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Nature’s ambiguities generally lie outside our direct perception . Relativistic effects only become pronounced at near the speed of light. The contradictory, unresolved behaviors of sub-atomic particles dissipates as objects get larger. Unconscious thoughts, by definition, lie outside our immediate awareness. Thus, it is possible to be largely oblivious to the ambiguities inherent in nature. However, one hundred years of scientific research has established that ambiguity imbues the world around and within us.
As ambiguity became heightened in science, so too did ambiguity become heightened in art.
All great works of art leave questions open: Is Hamlet mad or just pretending to be? Is the Mona Lisa smiling? 20th century artists didn’t need to make their art ambiguous—it already was. Instead, they strove to amplify art’s ambiguity . Painters created abstract images that did not refer explicitly to observable reality. Writers created non-linear narratives that shifted around in time or were told from multiple perspectives. How did composers heighten the ambiguity in music?
Because it is non-verbal and often non-representational, music is particularly ambiguous.
During a pre-concert radio interview, a radio announcer commented to the conductor that a section of a Bruckner Symphony was one of the composer’s most“optimistic”passages. To which the maestro replied soberly,”Actually, I find it quite pessimistic.”Abstract music will always resist easy interpretation.
And yet, as the following discussion will make clear, classical composers put a high value on clarity and resolution. Progressive 20th-composers shifted the balance much more strongly towards the uncertain and the unresolved.
“U tita enska aka ca vik i totar i tari”
Speaking in a personal language—no matter how thoroughly imagined and consistent—automatically heightens ambiguity. The sentence above—an example of Skerre, a language invented by linguist Doug Ball—would take a long time and a great deal of analysis to decipher. Language functions most conveniently in a community where everyone shares a similar vocabulary and syntax. Because music does not have fixed definitions, linguistic parallels are often misleading. Nevertheless, the shared materials, methods and formal methods of the“common practice era”helped to make the music more accessible. Listening to one common practice era work helped you understand how to listen to others .
The following excerpts by Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms were written seventy years apart.
If Schubert had been alive to hear Brahms’work, the music would no doubt have been intelligible to him.
During the 20th-century, the common practice era came to an end. Composers intensified the individuality of their musical voices. The following works for speaker and ensemble were written within several years of each other:
A few decades later, the following string quartets were written very close together.
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