Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

“Recently there was given the overture to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, and all impartial musicians and music lovers were in perfect agreement that never was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic and ear-splitting produced in music. The most piercing dissonances clash in a really atrocious harmony, and a few puny ideas only increase the disagreeable and deafening effect.” (August von Kotzebue, Der Freimütige, Vienna, September 11, 1806)

“Beethoven’s compositions more and more assume the character of studied eccentricity. He does not write much now, but most of what he produces is so impenetrably obscure in design and so full of unaccountable and often repulsive harmonies, that he puzzles the critic as much as he perplexes the performer.” (The Harmonicon, London, April 1824)

“Beethoven mystified his passages by a new treatment of the resolution of discords, which can only be described in words by the term, ‘resolution by ellipsis,’ or the omission of the chord upon which the discordant notes should descend.... Many of his passages also appear confused and unintelligible, by a singular freedom in the use of diatonic discords or discords of transition; many instances appear of passages by contrary motion, each carrying their harmonies with them.” (Musical World, London, March 1836)

Source: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time by Nicolas Slonimsky (1953)

Yeah, so?

The quotations, are critics close to the "release" date of the work. Let's say it was "jarring" back then as a fresh listen.

In our case, it's been 60+ years, and in some cases 80 or 100 from unlistenable "contemporary classical" music and listeners didn't come around as they did with Beethoven.

Resistance to Beethoven's music continued well into the 20th century. From Charles Rosen's "Critical Entertainments":

>The difficulty of understanding Beethoven is well known: even at the end of the nineteenth century the late works were still contested, and the most famous piano teacher in Vienna, Leschetizky, advised his pupil Artur Schnabel not to play the last sonatas. In fact, I doubt if the enemies of contemporary music would sit through the Grosse Fuge if they did not know that Beethoven wrote it. Even as recently as the 1930s and 1940s, chamber music societies in smaller American cities would threaten to cancel concerts by the Budapest Quartet if they insisted on playing a late Beethoven quartet.

In any case, that would rather prove that Beethoven could also write unlistenable/unlikable pieces that never fully "caught on" - not that modern works are "undeservingly" thought as such.

And in Beethoven's case we also know that he did churn out perfectly catchy stuff a plenty, even for the most "untrained" listener.

I think your objection, together with the author of the review, rests on the assumption that throughout history there have always existed a mass audience that consumes and supports literate music. It's better to think this mass consumption as an aberration brought about by the enlightenment and has already run its course. Earlier in the same essay Charles Rosen explained it thus:

>There is some truth to these attacks, of course, but they all overlook the essentially artificial nature of a system that makes music depend principally on the listener. The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing. Public concerts are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind, dating largely from the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were a way of enabling musicians to make a living doing what they like to do after much of the patronage of church and court had been withdrawn. Musicians need and want an audience from time to time, but the public concert is only a small part of the making of music, not the whole of it: playing for a few friends, playing with other musicians, and even playing for oneself still provide the foundation of musical life. Making the public concert the economic basis of music has somewhat obscured the reason that music exists.

Of course, musicians being answerable to noone but themselves is a dangerous state of affairs which led to what the common man considers to be unlistenable music in the 20th century and beyond. Richard Taruskin delivered a scathing criticism of this in his essay "The Poietic Fallacy" in the collection "The Dangers of Music and other Utopian Essays".

So the question is not "why is modern classical music so unlistenable" but rather "why does 19th century music have such a large audience".

>I think your objection, together with the author of the review, rests on the assumption that throughout history there have always existed a mass audience that consumes and supports literate music.

Here in Europe, in many countries like Italy, Germany, Austria, and so on, it did exist. Concerts, operas, etc, were popular affairs, at least from middle class and above.

And in the 19th century and early 20th century, many illiterate people could also follow popular "literate" tunes, and sing arias and such.

>The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing. Public concerts are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind, dating largely from the latter half of the eighteenth century.

He got it backwards. Public music, in festivals, churches, rituals, celebrations and so on, was the norm throughout history. And folk musicians has been a job since forever - even in rural areas. Here in Southern Europe, for example, its a tradition lost in time...

>Here in Europe, in many countries like Italy, Germany, Austria, and so on, it did exist. Concerts, operas, etc, were popular affairs, at least from middle class and above.

Precisely, the mass consumption of literate (i.e. notated music) was created in the 19th century. Only two of Beethoven's piano sonatas were played _in public_ during his lifetime; the piano recital as we know today was invented by Liszt. Orchestral concerts and Opera also enormously expanded in popularity in the 19th century with the rise of the middle class and their cultural aspirations. Previously Opera has been the only truly "popular" art, and even then it has to be heavily subsidised as it can never survive on the support of the population at large.

The 19th century is a tiny slice in history for notated music in the West which stretches back to the Carolingian empire in the 9th century! Throughout vast swathes of history notated music was limited to chant and then polyphony which was cultivated by the musicians and their circle. Even the hugely democratising effect of printed music only brought in amateurs, who need to learn the notation and play or sing for themselves. This is not comparable with the situation from the invention of the recording when any person can access a large slice of the entire repertory of notated music at leisure.

>Public music, in festivals, churches, rituals, celebrations and so on, was the norm throughout history. And folk musicians has been a job since forever - even in rural areas. Here in Southern Europe, for example, its a tradition lost in time...

Precisely, and because they were not notated, it's very difficult to get an idea of what was played. We have the notation for literate music and we still debate endlessly on how they should be played! Those ephemereal music played in the taverns and markets are the true predecessors of "popular" music made for and by the people, not music for musicians like Mozart or Bach; Notated and unotated music form parallel traditions which intersect but remain distinct. You will note how I painstakingly repeat the terms "literate music" and "notated music" because that is the one distinguishing factor that unites everything from Perotin to Poulenc, and is a coherent topic on which discussion is possible rather than the much more amorphous idea of just "music". A lot of confusion surrounding this topic arose in the first place because no such distinction was made.

You are quoting critics negatively assessing a popular composer, whereas the article talks about how music now praised by critics largely fails to engage the public.

(Note that Fidelio did indeed receive an unenthusiastic reception in 1806 and only became successful when performed after a thorough revision in 1814.)

There is a case to be made for the cyclical nature of criticism, though we have to keep in mind the possibility of a cycle being really bad too... (as we surely forgot a lot of them already).

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