WHAT'S MISSING IN MODERN CLASSICAL MUSIC

Here is the opening of a long essay from PREJUDICES: Sixth Series, written in 1927 by H. L. Mencken, who, in addition to being a noted social critic, was an amateur musician.

BRAHMS

My excuse for writing of the above gentleman is simply that, at the moment, I can think of nothing else. A week or so ago, on a Baltimore summer evening of furious heat, I heard his sextette for strings, opus 18, and ever since then it has been sliding and pirouetting through my head. I have gone to bed with it and I have got up with it. Not, of course, with the whole sextette, nor even with any principal tune of it, but with the modest and fragile little episode at the end of the first section of the first movement—a lowly thing of nine measures, thrown off like a perfume, so to speak, from the second subject:


What is the magic in such sublime trivialities? Here is a tune so slight and unassuming that it runs to but eight measures and uses but six of the twelve tones in the octave, and yet it rides an elderly [note: Mencken was 46 at the time] and unromantic man, weighing 180 pounds and with a liver far beyond pills or prayer, as if it were the very queen of the succubi. Is it because I have a delicately sensitive ear? Bosh! I am almost tone-deaf. Or a tender and impressionable heart? Bosh again! Or a beautiful soul? Dreimal bosh! No theologian not in his cups would insure me against hell for cent per cent. No, the answer is to be found in the tune, not in the man. Trivial in seeming, there is yet in it the power of a thousand horses. Modest, it speaks with a clarion voice, and having spoken, it is remembered. Brahms made many another like it. There is one at the beginning of the trio for violin, cello and piano, opus 8 —the loveliest tune, perhaps, in the whole range of music. There is yet another in the slow movement of the quintette for piano and strings, opus 34. There is yet another in the double concerto for violin and cello, opus 102—the first subject of the slow movement. There is one in the coda of the Third Symphony. There is an exquisite one in the Fourth Symphony. But if you know Brahms, you know all of them quite as well as I do. Hearing him is as dangerous as hearing Schubert. One does not go away filled and satisfied, to resume business as usual in the morning. One goes away charged with something that remains in the blood a long while, like the toxins of love or the pneumococcus. If I had a heavy job of work to do on the morrow, with all hands on deck and the cerebrum thrown into high, I'd certainly not risk hearing any of the Schubert string quartettes, or the incomparable quintette with the extra cello, or the Tragic Symphony. And I'd hesitate a long time before risking Brahms.

The phenomenon Mencken was referring to was synthesized, distilled and perfected by the music industry about fifty years later. Just as the active component of poppy resin was eventually concentrated into heroin, and that of the coca leaf into crack cocaine, popular music concentrated catchy musical ideas, such as those Mencken spoke of, and began issuing records with nothing but such concentrated figures, and they gave these motifs a name—hooks—although some musicians call them riffs.

Soon, pop records became nothing but hooks. An early example of this was 1979's number-one song, "You Can Ring My Bell" by one-hit-wonder Anita Ward. There is the catchy theme, the hook, but nothing else. It is repeated a dozen times, then there is a bridge section which absolutely no one remembers, then the hook is repeated another dozen times. It is to music as is the pleasure of tobacco reduced to the nicotine patch. More recently, there has been the monster hit "Hey Ya" by Outkast. That too, is based on nothing but a (somewhat annoying) riff repeated over and over, and like crack cocaine, it has been hugely popular.

Moving along the musical spectrum, we may note that such fine musicians as Ferde Grofé (George Gershwin's orchestrator) and Fats Waller were masters of the hook, though their music was also somewhat short on development or sophistication. Skipping ahead to the complete opposite of pop music, modern composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luciano Berio have dispensed with riffs and hooks entirely. Modern composers have forsaken themes, let alone melodies, and one can sit through an hour of their music and remember nothing specific afterward other than glissandi. Their talent, such as it is, and goal is to write in a completely abstract and abstruse manner, just as it is likewise the goal of modern art to be abstract and refrain from representing or depicting any recognizable object.

Those are the two extremes of music today. There is pop music with nothing but repeated hooks and riffs, and there is modernist classical music with nothing infectious—no hooks, no riffs. It seems to me that the great tragedy of music today is the same as with modern politics— what happened to the middle ground? For music created during my lifetime, one has had a choice between bubble-gum music and biohazard music.

Having a memorable musical idea, a hook or a riff, does not necessarily cheapen a piece of music. As Mencken pointed out, there were many such hooks in the music of Brahms and Schubert, and what are the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth if they are not a riff? Nor is having a memorable phrase or idea limited to older music. While walking, especially while in a hurry, one of the themes from The Rite of Spring often goes through my mind. When afflicted with melancholia, I often think of the plaintive opening theme of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, and when excited, I often burst into howling the march melody from the same composer's Symphonic Metamorphosis or the finale of his Symphonic Dances.

My high-school band once performed the Theme and Variations for Band, Op. 43 by Arnold Schoenberg, and our director had us sing the theme out loud to imprint it in our minds. Soon, being obnoxious adolescents, we were singing it on public transportation on the way home. This was done to annoy the hapless adults, but it demonstrates that even in Schoenberg there are genuine themes. I still remember that theme today; it's a great piece.

In general, I detest neologisms, but there is a new and useful word to describe such recognizable and memorable ideas. The word is meme, and it was coined by the smartest man in the world, Richard Dawkins of Oxford (a handsome devil too, damn him). He illustrates the concept thusly:

"Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so memes propagate in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."

J. S. Bach did not invent the fugue; he heard someone play a fugue and he imitated the idea. Mozart did not invent sonata-allegro form; he likely imitated Haydn's use of it, and Haydn, in turn, got the idea from C. P. E. Bach. All of the great masters employed folk tunes and pop songs in their works. If the classical masters were geniuses at anything, it was the effective use of the recognizable and memorable musical ideas—memes—of their time.

The general lack of memes, and specifically the lack of memorable hooks and riffs, is what ails modern classical music. I suspect that many modern composers sit down to create music without a definite idea of what they are about to write. (In academia, the motivation is likely tenure or grant money.) They noodle around on the keyboard, think, Hey, that sounds pretty radical, and simply string ideas together.

By contrast, the classical masters often began with a popular tune of the day, or, in the case of J. S. Bach, a common dance rhythm— something with a hook. What separates their music from ordinary music is what they did with the meme. They would take the idea—often the bygone equivalent of "Hey Ya" by Outkast—and expand on it, manipulate it and develop it. Today's classical votaries will hear such a melody, clasp their hands, turn their eyes heavenward and sigh over the genius that created something so inspired, but often they are gushing over a Top-40 tune of yesteryear.

It seems to me that what modern composers should attempt is to write something based on an idea which is easily recognizable and memorable, and I don't mean memorable in the sense of being historic or enduring; I mean memorable in the same sense that the McDonald's jingle is memorable. The simpler and more obvious, the better. This does not rule out modern techniques or harmony, as the repeated minor seconds used in Bernard Herrmann's music for the shower scene of Psycho is one of the most successful musical memes (hooks) of our time. I think poorly of composer John Williams, but I would fain admit that the ominous two-note figure in the bass (the shark theme) is also an ingenious hook. Actually, my opinion is of no significance; it is obvious that these are outstanding ideas, because both of them have become synonymous with impending danger, and both have been widely imitated. (Conversely, I can't resist pointing out how John Williams expropriated the 5/4 martial rhythm meme from "Mars" by Gustav Holst to use in one of his stupid movie scores.)

Classical music today would be better off if, instead of a tone row, composers started off with a pop tune just as the masters did. Alas, as copyright laws grow stricter and more protective, this is no longer possible. Instead, composers must concentrate on creating specific, easily-recognizable, memorable hooks—memes—then try and spin them into gold (or at least aluminum.) Simply figuring some passage of notes out on one's keyboard, then beaming over it because it sounds "classical" or sophisticated is not good enough—not good enough for the classical tradition if it lacks the irresistible hooks and the killer memes. And if you've ever walked across a parking lot with a great classical theme running around in your brain, you know very well that what I say and what Mencken said is true. Classical music always had the best, most infectious riffs, and the fact that today, hundreds of years and thousands of hears after they were composed, these same riffs are being used to ring cell phones proves just that. Will the music being written today be used on the pocket picture-phones or transponders of the future? Will young people be posting messages at the Forum's Name That Tune thread asking to identify Structures by Pierre Boulez or the Post-Pre-Ludium by Luigi Nono? Will anyone care about these works? Does anyone care now? Or are these pieces just as successful as a species with an insufficient number of chromosomes?

Despite the magnificent talent of such men as Schoenberg and Boulez, modern classical music has failed because it has lost sight of the very purpose of music. And exactly what is that purpose? I am certainly not eloquent enough to properly define the specific purpose of music, but I'd say that having something catchy sounding in your brain throughout the day—something that you enjoy having on your mind—is not a bad goal.