C'mon, Everybody: Will Music Bring Us Together?

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 55, Heft 1, S. 77-84

Abstract

Uses Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century to contemplate the American pop aesthetic, the popularity, or lack thereof, of modern classical music, & the notion that music was never more important as an art form than in the 1960s. Discussion begins with Arnold Schoenberg, who devised the twelve-tone system in the face of a post-Wagnerian assault on tonality & was the unwitting father of rampant serialism. American pop music, exemplified by George Gershwin & Irving Berlin, is briefly considered, drawing on Wilfrid Sheed who cites WWII as marking the collapse of that school. Jazz too had undergone a postwar transformation, embracing the emancipation of dissonance that had spurred Schoenberg to develop his twelve-tone system. Attention turns to the rise of rock-&-roll, addressing its impact on black-white relations in the US & how musicians of both races influenced each other's work. Further, the issue of baby boomer's clinging on to rock music, which was seen as youthful rebellion, is also considered as a way to examine the issue of why we, with all of our different musical tastes separating us, cannot accept our genres as all being music -- as Ross insists, music is music & a choice is not required -- & get along. However, Ross's solution is challenged on the basis of music's singular, social, cultural, & political importance in the 1960s. Rock's cultural significance is seen in its rejection of the emancipation of dissonance, in a sense, its conservatism. After warning that looking to the past too much in trying to navigate the future is a recipe for parody & sentimentality, a call is made for digging deeper into the Western tonal tradition, leading to remarks on melody, harmony, & scales. Modern classical music is seen as universal because its roots are nowhere, the American pop aesthetic is viewed as being rooted in the multiple American traditions, Western tonality, & the universality of the pentatonic scale. Music is seen as universal & elemental, capable of overcoming differences, & might one day be a single language that brings everyone together. D. Edelman