Perspectives of New Music

TONALITY, MUSICAL FORM, AND AESTHETIC VALUE WALTER HORN n a remarkably audacious article1—at least for something found in a buttoned down academic philosophy journal—Diana Raffman, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, boldly states that atonal music is and must always remain, not only artistically defective, but a con game. “I claim,” she writes, that “in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot intend to communicate pitch-related musical meaning by writing twelve-tone music. . . . To that extent, twelve-tone music is fraudulent, and so not art.”2 Her position may be familiar to the readers of Perspectives of New Music, since it is largely based upon certain results of empirical psychology compiled and theorized about by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff3 that have received some attention in these pages.4 The main support for Raffman’s argument is provided by two empirical premises. They are: 1. Human beings are psychologically (and/or physiologically) incapable of picking out what she takes to be the only “local structure” that can be supplied by twelve-tone rows as they are generally used in musical compositions written according to the technique fathered by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by such I 202 Perspectives of New Music composers as Anton Webern, Roger Sessions, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and Donald Martino; and 2. Many human beings are capable of picking out the local structure in tonal music. In this paper I shall assume the truth of these claims.5 That is, I shall not contest the proposition that no listener—untrained or expert—can pick out by ear the “local structure” of twelve-tone rows—as presented either horizontally or vertically—in any of their versions (original, inverted, retrograde, or retrograde inverted). I shall also assume that many tonal works have local forms or structures that can be recognized in the approved manner, at least by experienced listeners. While I will return to these themes as we proceed, my main focus in this essay will be what, if anything, may be inferred about the artistic or aesthetic value of a piece of music if those two empirical claims are supposed to be correct. I As we want to know what connections exist between a certain subspecies of musical form or structure and aesthetic value, it will be necessary for us to explain our key terms: music, local structure, and aesthetic value. All three of these are controversial, and numerous books in aesthetics and music theory have been largely devoted to their explication. Fortunately, however, it is less important that we get full agreement on each definition or general explanation here than that we ensure that we are both clear in what we mean and that we leave Raffman’s main thesis open to discussion. By the latter, I mean that we must be careful not to assume either what she wants to demonstrate or its contrary. For example, if we define “music” in such a way that only those items that are in the key of G may be correctly called “music” at all, then there will be no question of interest regarding what makes Mozart’s Symphony in G more aesthetically valuable than Vermeulen’s Symphony No. 4, because based on that definition, the Vermeulen piece isn’t music at all. It may well be that there is some batch of properties which is such that something is a piece of music if and only if it exemplifies each (or enough) of the properties in the batch, but, if so, that cluster cannot be used to distinguish some specimens of music from others as one might use “being in the key of G” to distinguish the Mozart from the Vermeulen in ordinary English.6 Tonality, Musical Form, and Aesthetic Value 203 Moving on to aesthetic value, it is similarly clear that we cannot fruitfully investigate the relationship of form to value if we begin from a position according to which it is tautological that only that which has a structure of a certain kind can be praiseworthy.7 Our knowledge that exemplifying this or that sort of form adds value to musical works must be something that can be learned...