Gimme some of that ol’ atonal music response
I’ve had several friends invite me to respond to the new Merle Hazard video. It’s pretty funny.
I did think it was cute, but here is the most honest response I can give.
It’s funny when the banjo happens because it is juxtaposed against a tonal center. It funny in the same way that juxtaposing things is always funny. For example:
The irony is that a work like Pierrot, where a sad clown is having a gut-wrenching psychological breakdown in the moonlight — so much so that he can no longer color within the prescribed musical lines — is being mocked for being overly intellectual by a style that is (by any measure) comparably emotionally monolithic. It’s pretty funny in a sort of dilettantish way to say that the hyper-emotional music of Schoenberg and Berg is all brain at the expense of feelings. It could even be true (if we judge by some of his writings) of Stravinsky’s post World War II music, but think of it in any other context, and you can see how offensive it is.
In this end, it’s funny to poke fun, but it’s pretty much not ok to question someone’s emotional sincerity. Here are how the rules work:
- You are aloud to dislike someones music.
- You are aloud to disagree with someone’s philosophy.
- You aren’t aloud to question someone’s emotional sincerity.
That’s not to suggest that people aren’t sometimes emotionally insincere. It’s just that questioning people emotional sincerity is the death of all conversation.
People used to criticize the Modern Jazz Quartet for being too intellectual and not emotional enough. Now imagine someone rapping about how emotionally deficient MJQ is. What about a nice singer/songwriter ballad about how Klezmer music was too erudite? It’s all in good fun of course, but a couple people asked me to respond, and I’m becoming a grumpy old man. Ergo, my overly German response to humor.
I get defensive when it comes to Schoenberg in particular. He expressly stated that his ideal was that music was supposed to have both heart and brain. I’ve often criticized Stravinsky for his attempts to get emotion out of music, but those attempts were all wildly more tonal then his earlier “atonal” music that is being criticized here for being too apathetic. When he wanted to get rid of emotion, he kind of walked away from “atonality” until later in life.
That being said, I’ll probably need to get to work on my atonal response to Merle Hazard in which the sprechstimme part will emotionally critique Hazard as being too analytical and not opening his heart to Alban Berg.
In any case, I don’t like to criticize others without providing others with the same opportunity to respond to me. Here is when I played Pierrot which is kind of music he is criticizing for being only for the brain and not for the heart.
