A curious detail of music history (with shoggoths)

[ecosophia]

My current fiction project is The Shoggoth Concerto, a novel set in the same fictive world as my series The Weird of Hali but not part of the same story arc. One of the two main characters is a young mixed-race woman attending Partridgeville State University in Partridgeville, New Jersey -- fans of Frank Belknap Long stories will know already to expect reference to the occultist Halpin Chalmers and the terrifying Hounds of Tindalos -- who is taking her first steps toward becoming a neo-Baroque composer. (The other main character is a shoggoth, but that's another story.) To get the necessary background for the character, I've been reviewing most of the history of Western music, and ran into a very odd detail. 

There were a variety of significant shifts between Baroque music -- think Bach and Vivaldi -- and classical music -- think Beethoven and Brahms -- but one that really stands out is the role of the melody line. In most classical music, as in popular music since then, there's a single melody line over the top of the bass line, and the "harmonic middle" between them -- the other voices that give the music richness. In Baroque music, there were very often multiple melody lines, with the interplay between them creating the harmony. 

The change from Baroque to classical happened right about the time the industrial revolution took off. So at the same moment that our civilization committed itself to the trajectory of industrialism, with its myth of linear progress and its dependence on a straight-line movement of resources to waste, the musical expressions of our civilization shifted from forms that embraced many melodies at the same time, to forms that permitted only one. Blake's comments about single vision seem even more trenchant...

Comments

[auntlili]

It may be worth considering that around the same time music changed location. Where it was once heard in homes, salons, palaces and churches, increasingly there were concert halls. Music went from diversion or accompaniment to the center of attention, and so it needed it's own workplace. In other words, it became specialized or, if you like, commodified.

[(Anonymous)]

As an amateur singer, I've experienced the difference you describe here. For me, the contrast is especially clear if we cast our gaze all the way back to the Renaissance. When I sing the true polyphony of, say, Palestrina or Victoria, the part that I'm singing (like each and every other part) makes sense on its own; it's going somewhere, doing something. Sure, all the voices come together to make something bigger, but the greater whole emerges from individual voices who are already, each in itself, whole and complete.

Contrast that with, say, Mozart or Haydn, where my part only makes sense with reference to the soprano line. Here, the middle voices are *only* there in service of that melody outside themselves; they are not self-complete individuals when considered apart from the larger work.

Needless to say, I much prefer to sing Palestrina. (Turning to your example, Vivaldi, on the other hand, is just brutal. He wants to play the human neck as if it were the neck of a violin. Done well, it sounds beautiful. But ouch.)

Hope that made some kind of sense.

--barefootwisdom

[ecosophia]

Thank you for this! It makes quite a bit of sense; the reduction of all the parts between soprano and bass to the "harmonic middle" is exactly what I had in mind.

[jbucks]

I totally agree, I was thinking this very thought not long ago while listening to Bach and trying to figure out why I can never get tired of listening to it. A few further observations (I'm an amateur musician):

- When I was learning to write counterpoint, one of the major things one I had to keep in mind is that, in the renaissance, harmony was an 'accidental' effect of multiple voices moving in concert. The focus was getting each voice to work well as its own melody, and by doing so according to the counterpoint rules, you achieved good harmony. A sort of bottom-up definition of harmony.

That changed in the Classical period - a single melody became more important and the idea of chords emerged, all the voices became subservient to top-down harmonic rules. One should try to do good voice leading, but not if it interfered with the chord. As I understood it, Bach was sort of at the transition point, it seems he did think in terms of chords, but within that, each voice was still treated independently.

- There was a move to abstraction in music theory: equal temperament 'bent' the rules of natural harmony in favour of a system which allowed modulations to different keys.

- Linear progress: as you know there are chord 'progressions', the idea that you departed from your tonic key, went through a journey using chords to eventually arrive back home to the tonic via a cadence. Of course there were cadences in earlier music, but usually just to finish a piece. As far as I know, music theory in earlier times did not have the idea of progress in it.

The same could be said of the idea of development in music. Although of course the idea of development was inherent to the fugue, which is an older form.

- I recently found this extract from a book about Bach which touches on your own comment. It's about an encounter between Frederick the Great and Bach:

"Bach represented church music, especially the "learned counterpoint" of canon and fugue, a centuries-old craft that by now had developed such esoteric theories and procedures that some of its practitioners saw themselves as the custodians of a quasi-divine art.

Frederick and the generation of Bach's sons were having none of that. They denigrated counterpoint as the vestige of an outworn aesthetic, extolling instead the "natural and delightful" in music, by which they meant the easier pleasure of song, the harmonic ornamentation of a single line of melody.

For Bach this new, so-called "galant" style, with all its lovely figures and stylish grace, was full of emptiness. Bach's cosmos was one in which the planets themselves played the ultimate harmony, a tenet that had been unquestioned since the "sacred science" of Pythagoras; composing and performing music was for him and his musical ancestors a deeply spiritual enterprise.

For Frederick and his generation, the goal of music was simply to be "agreeable", an entertainment and a diversion."

From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/jan/14/classicalmusicandopera.jsbach

That music should be an entertaining diversion has reached its apex in today's pop music, I hope that there is a role as time goes on for music that uses the older idea of harmony which is complex but which does not grate on the ears.

[ecosophia]

Jbucks, that makes perfect sense. The conflict between music as a way of knowing and music as entertainment goes way back; the Pythagoreans in ancient Greece wrote about it, and there are Chinese sources from the Chou dynasty, if I remember correctly, that talk about how you can tell that an age is on its way to decadence and collapse when the true harmonies get discarded in favor of pretty harmonies that are false but pleasing. It's quite common for a minority to turn back to the older and more exact forms in the twilight years of a civilization, so my character is in good company!

[(Anonymous)]

Might be worth pointing out that technically "classical music" (Mozart, Haydn) is a form that comes between Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi) and Romantic (Beethoven went through the transition from classical to Romantic in his lifetime, Brahms could be considered a "high Romantic" composer).

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. Yes, I've been doing more reading up on music history and getting the periods more precisely defined.

[(Anonymous)]

The rise of "classical" music also brought a transition from "employed" composers to "genius" creators and soloists (like Mozart, Beethoven and Paganini), for what it's worth... anioush