Review of Katz’s A Language of Its Own

Katz, Ruth. A Language of Its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

review by Chelle Stearns

I still remember the wonder and awe that I felt in one of my undergrad music history classes when I heard about the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring. On that evening in Paris on May 29th, 1913, the agitation of the audience began as mild discomfort but soon devolved into a riot. People were provoked to the point of fighting with their neighbors, as many attempted to stop the performance. As the police were called in, the ballet continued but peace never returned that evening; or so the story goes. Whether or not the audience was responding to the music or the choreography, we don’t really know. It could have been the combination of primitive source material (based on a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death), the rhythmic energy of the orchestration, or the risqué and violent movements of the dancers of the Ballets Russes. Regardless of what caused the commotion, the picture that we were given as undergraduate music students was of mass pandemonium.

This was such a strange story for a late twentieth century young, American girl to hear. I had known this piece through Disney’s Fantasia, and did not find it offensive or troubling. Actually, I really liked it. Why such an extreme reaction to a piece? After all, this was classical music, not rock-n-roll!

Not until years later did I understand that this reaction to new music in the twentieth century was not unique or even unusual. For example, a few years ago I heard a Fresh Air interview with the American composer Steve Reich. Terry Gross, the interviewer, read a story by Michael Tilson Thomas about the extreme reaction to Reich’s Four Organs at Carnegie Hall in 1973. Tilson Thomas commented that there were at least 3 attempts by the audience to end the performance, then “one woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the stage, wailing, ‘Stop, stop! I confess!’”¹

Later I realized that not only was the supposed riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring not unique, but it was also not the first riot provoked by a classical music concert. Evidently, at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, unruly audiences were common, as composers experimented and expanded traditional forms. It is reported that audiences in 1902 were in an uproar over one non-traditional chord found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. You can only imagine their response to the premiere of his Second String Quartet in 1908, in which he adds a soprano soloist in the final two movements while tossing the elements of traditional triadic tonality into the air as if they would never land.²

Schoenberg later wrote that his

second string quartet caused at its first performance in Vienna…riots which surpassed every previous and subsequent happening of this kind. Although there were also some personal enemies of mine, who used the occasion to annoy me…I have to admit that these riots were justified without the hatred of my enemies, because they were a natural reaction of a conservatively educated audience to a new kind of music.³

Here we have one answer to why reasonably educated and polite people would present such extreme behavior upon hearing “a new kind of music.” These audiences were more conservatively educated, meaning that they were trained to expect what they had heard before, guided by what were accepted as the well-known rules of Western art music. It can be said that this fissure between the conservative desires of concert goers and the inner compulsion of composers toward originality is one of the defining characteristics of twentieth century art music.

But how did such strong reactions and conservatively held beliefs about music come about? Even one hundred years after the premieres of Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s works, most audiences still expect certain sounds from the Western musical tradition. It is as if traditional music has a specific logic or language of its own that communicates in a particular way. And it is this language that was challenged and changed at the turn of the twentieth century. But where did this language come from?

It is this story, the story about the “making” of Western art music, that Ruth Katz expounds in her book, A Language of Its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music. Katz argues two foundational points in her book: 1) music is made by culturally bound people; and 2) people hear, or receive, music based upon how they have been trained to understand music. Throughout the book, she gives examples of how people from non-Western cultures perceive Western art music, showing that musical assumptions in the West are not normative but, instead, culturally formed. This assertion enables her to claim that Western art music is a unique and important cultural accomplishment while also arguing that music in the West is neither a “natural” nor an obvious outcome from the material of music. Instead, Western art music developed (or was “made”) through the interaction between practice and theory, with the former driving the latter.

Katz asserts that the theory and practice of music in the West was purposely constructed through social and technological means in order to establish both external and internal references in music. These references are the very processes by which composers, performers, and theorists set up the internal logic of music — what she refers to as “the language of music.” In other words, music eventually was able to function according to its own inner logic, even when coupled with external elements — such as words or metaphysical categories.

At one point, Katz looks in detail at how the technique of notation was able to facilitate the expansion and control of musical form and content. There was a desire to control both pitch and duration as liturgical chant became more complicated so that the vocalists could sing well together as more voices were added and compositions became longer. For her, the development of the basic musical building blocks was a crucial turning point in Western art music, rather than an assumed or “natural” way of thinking about music. The relationship between word and music was essential to this but even after music was able to stand on its own — in the age of “absolute music” — other points of reference were often sought.

The unfolding of music enabled more and more internal references to be developed in musical practice such that both vertical and horizontal considerations were taken into account in the construction of musical coherence. As triadic tonality was developed, music was able to stand on its own, without reference to word, but soon after, the philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries propelled music into a more metaphysical role. Music was now able to express the inexpressible, giving deeper meaning to word and even to our inner lives. She refers to this as “the epistemological turn” — the how and the what we know.

It is at this juncture, Katz argues, that music moved from the inner language of form and tonality to the necessary expression of the inner life and creativity of the composer. Rather than follow the established rules and traditions of form and content, composers and audiences alike sought more expression. Wagner, following Schopenhauer, argued that music was able to illuminate the inner meaning of everything, especially poetry, which sounded out the inner life of humanity.

This turn toward originality and creativity enabled the amazing music of the nineteenth century Romantics, but it was also, as Katz points out, the very means of unraveling the carefully constructed language of music developed from Gregorian chant to Palestrina to Bach to Mozart to Wagner and then to Schoenberg. She argues that Schoenberg’s “emancipation of the dissonance,” begun in 1908, lead the way to this unravelling.⁴ The result of this was a fissure between composers and audiences. At the same time, music theorists strove to understand not only the practice but also the reception of music, searching for a way to articulate the necessity of the listener.

Overall, this is a sweeping book, jumping from detailed musicological discussions to key musical innovations to broad philosophical and social-technical assertions.⁵ I often found this book difficult to follow, most readers will want to skip over more detailed sections, as Katz herself encourages.⁶ I also hoped for a more nuanced philosophical understanding of music theory and practice, questioning the reasons why important shifts happened. Nevertheless, Katz’s obvious knowledge and experience compelled me to take her impassioned portrait of Western art music seriously. In the end, she does not call for an idealistic return to any particular rules, standards or periods of composition. Instead, Katz hopes that Western art music will be seen for what it is, a great accomplishment of humanity. What comes next? Well, that will be determined by the practice of the next generation of composers and audiences alike.

Endnotes:

1. Terry Gross, Fresh Air from WHYY: Steve Reich at 70, October 6th, 2006. http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=6209213&m=6209214. (Accessed on August 17th, 2010.)
2. “Can one understand sound combinations if they hang forever in the air and never settle down; if they never gain a firm footing? I read somewhere of a device by which aeroplanes refuel over the sea without standing firm anywhere…. If that is possible, should one not do it?” Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Stein, ed., Leo Black, trans. (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 101.
3. Joseph,Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 57.
4. She also discusses in detail Schoenberg’s later development of “serialism” or “dodecaphony.”
5. Her section on how the Camerata (“The Camerata: Custodians of a Paradigm” in chapter three) helped to form and construct early attempts at opera is especially good. Her argument is that the men of the Camerata purposely wove together not only word and music, but the emotional sense of the words and the drama.
6. In her preface, even Katz suggests that the general reader “skip technical explanations.”

Chelle Stearns is Associate Professor of Theology at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and the author of Handling Dissonance: A Musical Theological Aesthetic of Unity.