Is Freedom Overrated?

For those who like ruminating on composers and their craft, there's an excellent piece up over at NewMusicBox which asks the question: does the diversity of musical styles in use at the moment really offer composers the creative freedom that many believe? Or, as the article puts it, "is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes?"

In other words, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was basically one set of rules for how music was written, and while composers regularly pushed the envelope (chords that were considered wildly dissonant in Bach's time, for instance, became commonplace by the time Brahms and Wagner came around,) everyone followed the rules. Then came the 20th century, during which rabble-rousers like Arnold Schönberg, John Cage, and Steve Reich discarded the rule book chapter by chapter, until it seemed that you could put together any combination of notes and silences and call it music.

Of course, there are still rules - it's just that composers have their choice of any number of different rule books, which bear little resemblence to each other. The Modernist rule book is longer and more complicated than the old tonal rule book was, while the Postmodern rule book is more like a single sheet of paper with the sentence, "Don't do anything the modernists do" scrawled across it in crayon. The Neo-Romantics have their own rules, based heavily on the rule book of 100 years ago, and function basically as if the Modernists and Pomos had never existed. And for the composers who place themselves in the New Complexity camp (don't ask,) there are presumably hundreds of rules, but they don't matter because the music will wind up sounding like someone just dropped a piano onto a bagpipe regardless.

So do composers benefit from being able to choose from such a wide array of philosophies? Do audiences? Those who despise dissonant music would probably wish for everyone to go back to writing tonal music with the old rules, but reducing the number of dissonant works wouldn't necessarily mean that the music would be better. Statistically, only a very few composers build a legacy that significantly outlives them, so you're always going to hear more bad or mediocre new works than you will mediocrities from the 19th century. It's not that there weren't plenty of mediocre composers back then - we've just stopped playing their music.

Common sense would seem to dictate that when composers fragment, it takes music as a whole longer to evolve, which could be why we've gotten a bit stuck in the decades since Schönberg started messing around with his twelve tones. Still, it's probably impossible to really assess the impact of philosophies that are still developing, and I know several composers who believe that all the navel gazing should really be left to musicologists and historians, and that composers just ought to write whatever music speaks to them. And with that, we've come full circle...