Previous - 142. Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky continued
Stravinsky the Hipsterp134 ...the terrible beauty of the "Augers" chord ["the awful sound that started the riot"] is not really dissonant. The sound is actually composed of classic tonal chords set against each other, in dissonant conjunction. Stravinsky melts together two separate harmonic poles, which has a short-circuiting effect. The ear hears shards of harmony (E, E-flat, C), but the brain can't fit the shards together...
Because the sound is new, Stravinsky electrified the familiar... The brain is befuddled, its cells baffled. We have no idea what this sound is, or where it might go, or what note will come next. We feel the tension, but we can't imagine the release. This is the shock of the new.
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p136 This is the method of The Rite. First Stravinsky throws a wrench into our pattern-making process, deliberately and loudly subverting everything we think we know... Then... Stravinsky forces us to generate patterns from the music itself, and not from our preconceived notions of what the music should be like. By abandoning the conventions of the past, he leaves us with no pattern but that which we find inside his own ballet music... Even when we can recognize Stravinsky's notes, their arrangement confuses us, for Stravinsky fragments everything. His imagination was a blender.
p137 All of this novelty leaves us bitterly disoriented. To find the echo of order in The Rite, we have to pay exquisite attention. If we fail to listen carefully, if we tune out its engineered undulations, then the whole orchestra becomes nothing more than a mutiny of noise. The music disappears. This is what Stravinsky wanted. "To listen is an effort," he once said, "and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also." [Sounds like a Russian proverb.]
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...His symphonic music denies us a consonant climax. It mocks our expectations of a happy ending. In fact, it mocks all our expectations.
...Stravinsky decides to kill his virgin with some big timpani drums. He forces her to dance the impossible dance, giving her a different beat in every musical bar. The rhythmic patters fly by in a schizophrenic babble: 9/8 becomes 5/8, which becomes 3/8, which abruptly shifts into 2/4-7/4-3/4, and so on. Our cells can sense the chaos here; we know that this particular wall of sound is irresolvable. All we can do is wait. This too must end.
Plato's Mistake
p138 What is music?...
Stravinsky... believed... that noise became music "only by being organized, and that such an organization presupposes a conscious human act."...
This was a radical new definition of music. Ever since Plato, music had been seen as a metaphor for the innate order of nature. We don't make music, Plato said, we find it. While reality appears noisy, hidden in the noise is an essential harmony, "a gift of the Muses."...
Plato... insisted that music... be strictly censored inside his imaginary republic... Plato believed that only consonant musical pitches -- since they vibrated in neat geometrical ratios -- were conducive to rational thinking... Unfortunately, this meant systematically silencing all dissonant notes and patterns, since dissonance unsettles the soul. Feelings were dangerous
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But Plato... misunderstood what music actually is. Music is only feeling. It always upsets our soul. If we censored every song that filled people with irrational emotions, then we would have no songs left to play... music really begins when... order collapses. We make art out of the uncertainty.
Thanks to having read The Birth of Tragedy, we have another perspective on this and on what Plato was afraid of with non-consonant music... the music of Dionysus. Though it isn't clear to me that Stravinsky's music is Dionysian.
p139 ...the myth Stravinsky took the most pleasure in shattering was the parable of progress... While Plato believed that music would one day perfectly mirror the harmony of the cosmos -- and thus inspire our souls with the pure sound of reason -- Stravinsky's symphonies were monuments to the meaninglessness of progress... music is simply a syntax of violated patterns. It doesn't become better over time, it just becomes different.
...within a few years of its premiere, The Rite was being performed to standing ovations... The same symphony that once caused a violent riot became the cliched example of modern music. Audiences were able to hear its delicate patterns... By 1940, Walt Disney used The Rite in the sound track of Fantasia. The "Augurs" chord was fit for a cartoon.
p140 ... The auditory cortex... is deeply plastic. Neuroscience, stealing vocabulary from music, has named these malleable cells the corticofugal network, after the fugal form Bach made famous. These contrapuntal neurons feed back to the very substrate of hearing, altering the specific frequencies, amplitudes, and timing patterns that sensory cells actually respond to. The brain tunes its own sense of sound, just as violinists tune the strings of their instruments.
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...the brainstem contains a network of neurons that respond only to surprising sounds. When the musical pattern we know is violated, these cells begin the neural process that ends with the release of dopamine... (Dopamine is also the chemical source of our most intense emotions, which helps to explain the strange emotional power of music, especially when it confronts us with newness and dissonance.)...
Okay, now we have a possible link with the Dionysian. Also, I would bet that dopamine was what was inhibited when Temple Grandin sheep-dipped herself. And why I get a near-religious response to Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and the guitar gods.
p141 But dopamine has a dark side. When the dopamine system is imbalanced, the result is schizophrenia. [Footnote: "While schizophrenia cannot be reduced to any single anatomical cause, the dopaminergic hypothesis is neurosciences' most tenable explanation. According to this theory, many of the symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by an excess of certain dopamine receptor subtypes, especially in the mesolimbic-mesocortial dopamine system." Well that's interesting. Now we can toss "hearing voices" and "voice hearing" and the extremes of religious experience into this dopamine pot. Not only do you "hear" the voice of God but you have an intense emotional response to that experience.] If dopamine neurons can't correlate their firing with outside events, the brain is unable to make cogent associations. Schizophrenics have elaborate auditory hallucinations precisely because their sensations do not match their mental predictions. As a result, they invent patterns where there are none and can't see the patterns that actually do exist.
The premiere of The Rite, with its methodical dismantling of the audience's musical expectations, literally simulated madness. By subverting the listener's dopamine neurons, it also subverted their sanity... the corticofugal system... takes a dissonant sound, a pattern we can't comprehend, and makes it comprehensible. As a result, the pain of The Rite becomes bearable. And then it becomes beautiful.
p142 The corticofugal system has one very interesting side effect... Over time... we become better able to hear those sounds that we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know... and to ignore the difficult songs we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness. [But is that true for schizophrenics?]
...The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before... If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth... [No pain, no gain?]
...Works like The Rite jolt us our of complacency. They keep us literally open-minded...
p143 ... The Rite of Spring was... the sound of art changing the brain.
Once again, far more here than I was expecting, with connections to so much more than the obvious Doctor Faustus and The Birth of Tragedy. This book definitely going to be a keeper, and I didn't buy it -- my library branch had a copy -- so now it looks like I will have to find a copy. And still two chapters to go.
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