0.14 Making music modern  (Page 5/9)

Minimal exposition

In football, the quarterback announces the play in the huddle; then the offense steps up to the line of scrimmage and runs the play. In music, expository statements establish the identity of a musical idea; developmental passages put the idea into action. Most classical music operates like a football offense: an idea is first introduced, then put into action.

In a no-huddle offense, the quarterback calls out the plays at the line of scrimmage. Teams use the no-huddle offense to speed up the pace of the game and confuse the defense. This creates a much more ambiguous and hectic situation. It is harder to defend, because there is less time to analyze formations. Analogously, in music, when exposition is abbreviated and development intensified, ambiguity is heightened.

In the most extreme cases, a modern work may consist exclusively of development . This is as if a team were to spend the entire game in a no-huddle offense! In such cases, the identity of the underlying material may be very difficult to perceive.

Lack of literal repetition

We establish our identity through our name, our driver’s license, social security number, credit cards, personal belongings, habits, tastes, family and friendships. In music, the most forceful and clear way to establish identity is through literal repetition . Literal repetition is the strongest way to make a musical idea recognizable.

Buddhism challenges the concept of identity, considering it an illusion. We may cling to the emblems of an enduring self; but they are no more substantial than sand castles. The only permanent truth is“impermanence.”This finds a powerful correlation in one of modern music’s most radical innovations: The elimination of literal repetition. Removing literal repetition weakens any sense of a stable“musical identity”and heightens the music’s sense of impermanence and flux.

Lack of resolution

In classical music, a dissonance is a tendency tone that is considered unstable. A dissonance demands continuation: It must resolve to a stable tone, called a consonance .

Classical music makes an essential promise: All dissonances will resolve. Sometimes, resolutions are delayed; or new dissonances enter just as others are resolved. Eventually, however, the music will reach a state of repose and clarity.

In progressive modern music, dissonance is frequently intensified and sustained way beyond classical expectations.

In addition, there is a new paradigm: Dissonances no longer must resolve . Stability and clarification are no longer guaranteed.

Nowhere is the clarity of classical music more strongly established than at the end of a work. There, the music summons its greatest powers of resolution. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 ends with an emphatic affirmation of stability.

The absence of resolution at a work’s close guarantees greater ambiguity. In the following example from Pierre Boulez’s Dérive, a stable sound is sustained by the violin. The other instruments dart towards and away from this sound, never wholeheartedly coinciding with it. The effect is much more precarious than in the Beethoven example.