Beethoven's Ode to What?

In the hubbub of graduating and moving, I haven't been posting a lot the last several weeks, but a recent conversation with my dad prompted me to formulate some thoughts about larger philosophical issues in music. The cover of this month's Gramophone magazine features six of "Today's Great Composers", including Reich, Golijov and Adams. I'm familiar with music from all of these composers and I understand -- on the surface at least -- where they are coming from in terms of answering the musical traditions of the past. My dad, an admitted musical reactionary of extreme proportions, has trouble with all of their music, claiming that it lacks "melody", his defining factor for greatness (think Verdi). He also noticed with distain that all of the photographed composers are dressed in jeans or black khakis. Our opposing reactions to Gramophone's cover spurred an interesting conversation.

While some of these current composers are turning away from the esoteric philosophy-composition that has dominated so much art music of the last 50 years, there is no doubt that composition -- even with melody and with audience appeal in mind -- has been permanently transformed since the last of the canonical traditionalists in the 1940s or 50s. I argue that this is an inevitable evolution responding to the fragmentation of genres and the domination of commercialized music, and that members of the "Shuffle generation" like me -- younger people who routinely listen to music of a swath of genres -- understand the influences and the relevance of the music of Adams, Ades, Glass, et al. The best of their music is complex, thoughtful, beautifully structured and contains compelling lines, even if you might not get a "Di Quella Pira"- type melody with every aria. My dad sees this transformation as an inability to hear or understand real beauty, and therefore an irredeemable fault. In our conversation, he argued that the music of "today's great composers" simply isn't beautiful.

He's right in that the main purpose of most music today is not simply to represent beauty, as it has been in ages past. Often the purpose of today's art music is to represent more negative feelings, or at least a realistic sense of the world we live in. But this rejection of romantic ideals isn't just happening in art music. It's been in progress for decades in all art forms. Music may be where disillusionment, frustration, and anger are most commercialized -- those are, after all, the primary sentiments of much rap and hip hop -- but it's not an evolution confined to Western art music. In that vein, I suggested to my dad that the next generations might not even hear beauty the way he does; that, in fact, Beethoven's Ode to Joy might not even mean triumph, joy, and beauty to listeners in 50 years, the way it does to him. This idea absolutely floored him. There has always been to him, and to many of his generation, one absolute aesthetic. But if a child of today grows up hearing only commercial music, what guarantee is there that that child will think "Oh! Joy, brotherly love, beauty!" if suddenly confronted with the Ode to Joy?

I realized during my class this past semester how much our aesthetic sense has changed as humans over the course of the past few hundred years as we discussed modes and liturgical music. In early church music, modes were beautiful, although they mostly sound a little strange to us today. Similarly, as we studied Islamic music, I was made aware of the maliable construct of our 12-tone scale. In Islamic music, their scale has 47 tones! There apparently is no absolute even in those elements of music that are mathematically constructed.

These aesthetics change over much longer periods than just one person's lifetime, which is why my dad has such a hard time imagining a world without the Ode to Joy. After all, Western art music of the past three hundred years is, essentially, all he's ever known. As a reactionary myself -- although not to the degree of my father -- I want to work to make sure the Ode to Joy always means joy, brotherly love, and beauty to those who hear it. But I also understand that there is no absolute aesthetic, that Western art music must work to find its place among the myriad of contemporary genres, and that those other genres are speaking to people with as much force as the Ode to Joy speaks to my dad.