142. Igor Stravinsky

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Igor Stravinsky - From Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p123 ...While the crowd at the premier [of The Rite of Spring] assumed that beauty was immutable -- some chords were just more pleasing than others -- Stravinsky knew better. An instinctive modernist, he realized that our sense of prettiness is malleable, and that the harmonies we worship and the tonic chords we trust are not sacred. Nothing is sacred. Nature is noise. Music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear. With The Rite, Stravinsky announced that it was time to learn something new. [If this doesn't lead to jazz and my guitar gods, I will be surprised.]

His faith in our mind's plasticity -- our ability to adapt to new kinds of music -- was Stravinsky's enduring insight. When he was first composing The Rite, in Switzerland, testing out its dissonant chords on his piano, a young neighborhood boy got into the habit of yelling, "That's wrong!" at his window. Stravinsky... knew the brain would eventually right his wrongness. The audience would adapt to his difficult notes and discover the beauty licked inside his art. As neuroscience nowknows, our sense of sound is a work in progress. Neurons in the auditory cortex are constantly being altered by the songs and symphonies we listen to. Nothing is difficult forever.

The Birth of Dissonance 
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Where has this book been all my life?

p125 [Stravinsky studying under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov] ...The problem facing modern music, Korsakov said, was simple: orchestral music had become boring. Wagner's vaunted ambition had been largely replaced by cheerful pastiche, most of it written for the ballet... The modern composer was trapped by the past. For this reason, the revolution in sound would have to begin with an act of deconstruction...

p126 The modernist coup d'etat occurred in 1908, when Arnold Schoenberg decided to abandon the structure of classical music... Before Schoenberg, every symphony followed a few simple rules. First, the composer introduced the tonic triad, a chord of three notes. This chord was the invisible center of the music, the gravitational force that ordered its unfolding. Next the composer carefully wandered away from the tonic triad, but never too far away. (The greater the acoustic distance from the tonic, the greater the dissonance, and too much dissonance was considered impolite.) The music always concluded with the tonic's triumphant return, the happy sound of a harmonic ending.

Schoenberg... began daydreaming of "the day when dissonance will be emancipated," when the symphony will be set free from the easy cliches of the eight-note scale...
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p127 In the program that night, ["Schoenberg's String Quartet no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, written in 1908"] Schoenberg tried to explain the logic behind his "pandemonium." He needed freedom from form because musical form had ceased to mean anything. "The overwhelming multitude of dissonances" could no longer be suppressed or censored...

Waves of Noise
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p129 ...while every sound starts as a temporary pattern of hair cells, that's only the beginning of listening. In the time it takes to play a sixteenth note, the sensory rumors heard by the ear are rehearsed again and again inside the brain. Eventually, the sound reaches the primary auditory cortex, where neurons are designed to detect specific pitches... the auditory cortex focuses on finding the note amid the noise. We tune out the cacophony we can't understand... When these selective neurons in the auditory cortex become excited, the vague shudders of air finally become a musical note. 

p130 ...Music is the pleasurable overflow of information... the mind... stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using its short-term memory for sound... to uncover patterns at the larger level of the phrase, motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all the notes...

It is this psychological instinct -- this desperate neuronal search for a pattern... that is the source of music... We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And once the brain finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make predictions, imagining what notes will come next. It projects imaginary order into the future, transposing the melody we have just heard into the melody we expect...

The Tension of Emotion
... Tonal music... begins by establishing of melodic pattern by way of the tonic triad. This pattern establishes the key [which sense of key?] that will form the song... A key or theme is stated in a mnemonic pattern, and then it is avoided, and then it returns, in a moment of consonant repose.

p131 But before a pattern can be desired by the brain, that pattern must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring... The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. The auditory cortex rejoices... 

This sounds like a love affair from In Search of Lost Time. This is the pattern of the recurring love theme starting with Swann & Odette, and then repeated with Gilbert and finally Albertine. Can that be a coincidence? A work structured like a piece of music that shares the pattern of denied fulfillment?. 

...the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the fifth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, opus 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with -- but not submission to -- expectations of order... If E major is the tonic, Beethoven plays incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He preserves an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

p132 ...Music is only interesting when it confronts us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict. Stravinsky's insight was that what the audience really wanted was to be denied what it wanted. 

[In The Rite]... Dissonance never submits to consonance. Order does not defeat disorder. There is an obscene amount of tension, but it never gets resolved. Everything only gets worse. And then it ends.
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[In The Rite]...We do not know what notes will come next. And this makes us angry.
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Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music."... When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why.

 Here is a performance of The Rite of Spring,

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