music history

The Day Classical Music Committed Suicide

and who fired the pistol that killed it

author-prompted image via openart.ai, edited in PhotoPad Image Editor

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On March 31, 1913, Classical Music committed suicide. The genre did not intend that outcome, but the events of that day nevertheless did eventually have that effect.

It was a long time coming, though. Music had been building toward that climax for several years, starting around 1896 or so. Here’s what I mean:

Picture Vienna in 1883. Richard Wagner has just died. The city is in mourning. Or, rather, most of it is. There’s a minority view present in the environs, though. That view is held by supporters of the composer Johannes Brahms, who is still alive. (And who in fact won’t die til 1897.)

The general musical opinion in Vienna at that time is that Wagner has been ‘forward-looking,’ while Brahms is thought of as ‘looking backward.’ The two composers never compared themselves to each other in that way, but they probably would have agreed, given the opportunity. Because, generally speaking, it was and is true. Wagner did attempt to explore new grounds musically, especially in regard to harmony, while Brahms consciously tried to emulate the earlier composition masters such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, though he thought that by doing so he was preparing the way for an even better musical future.

Now you need to understand that in 1883, Classical Music and Popular Music were one and the same. Classical was Popular and Popular was Classical. There was only one art form involving organized sound, and it was called Music. Period. No qualificational verbiage necessary. You either liked music or you didn’t. Audiences got just as worked up about Classical then as devotees of Michael Jackson or Fleetwood Mac did yesterday and do today.

Vienna, then as now, was full of coffee houses. These establishments were not exactly the equivalent of today’s Starbucks. The patrons sitting in them did sort of worship the dark brew, yes, but they also were about philosophy and intellectualism and artistic sensibility. Including music. People had strong opinions about everything. Including music. There were opposing viewpoints, such as expressed by supporters of Brahms versus supporters of Wagner. And they clashed, at times almost violently.

Contrary to popular opinion, there were no actual riots in the streets on the matter, but there were heated discussions, especially in the coffee houses. The occasional blow was struck.

Now you mustn’t get the wrong idea. Wagner and Brahms themselves respected each other, and while they disagreed on the ‘direction’ that music should go, they each felt the other had the right to his own opinion on the issue. The supporters, not so much. Just as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift probably respect each other to a certain extent, while their supporters might not always go along with the peaceability.

The real issue, in Vienna and throughout the world of music, was whether the listener was the most important component in the musical edifice or not. The debate (sometimes verbal, sometimes unstated) was whether the composer was justified in creating complexity or not, given the relative sophistication (or opposite) of the audience. This went back at least as far as J.S. Bach (died in 1750) and probably father back than that.

Bach’s own view on the matter (unstated so far as I know, but deducible from his compositions) was that he would get as complex and inventive as he liked, and if the listener could follow along, fine. And if not, also fine. Not his worrry.

This has most likely been fairly close to the attitude of most composers, including even both Brahms and Wagner. But there were some discernible differences too. Wagner felt that his role was to ‘educate’ the listener. In other words, he was the great authority and teacher, and the audience was there to be led to see the light. Whereas Brahms felt that the audience needed to feel the connection with the already established musical world (including Mr. Bach) in order to fully grasp what was going on.

There was another difference: a matter of style. Wagner was about spectacle. Just as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift both depend largely on light shows and on-stage dancers to achieve the maximum effect (in that way they are both Wagnerian), people more like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen are more interested in the musical content itself, when it comes to their work. More like Brahms in that regard.

Inevitably this all came to a head. The Wagnerian side was finally stated most famously as late as 1976, by Gerry Mulligan, the jazz saxophonist and arranger. He said, “The primary purpose of music is not for the listener. . . . It is for the person who is making it.” (My own composition teacher at Juilliard, Stanley Wolfe, said in 1969, “Music is not about the listener.” But he said it just to me, not for general consumption.)

Something similar had been written by Milton Babbit in 1958, under the title ‘Who Cares if You Listen?” Now to be fair, that was not the title he had given his article. The publishers imposed that one on him. But it pretty well sums up what he said, all the same.

And the bottom line to the words of Babbit and Mulligan and Wolfe is this: Music is about the composer, not the performer, not the listener.

The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (late 1800s, early 1900s) never said anything remotely resembling that. In fact, his oral and written statements on the subject are quite the opposite. But if we ignore what he said, and instead pay attention to what he did, then we have to revise our opinion of him.

To do that, we have to go back to 1883 Vienna again for a moment. Although unstated by anyone at the time, part of the debate, between the supporters of Wagner and those of Brahms, was “Which of these two composers is going to have the most influence on future composers.”

And the answer, by far, is ‘Wagner.’ It’s quite easy, when you study such things, to see a well-defined line of influence from Wagner to dozens of well-known composers, including Bizet, Mahler, Vaughan Williams, Fauré, and Leonard Bernstein. And Schoenberg.

(Brahms, on the other hand, led directly to only two other composers — Dvorak and Elgar.)

While he eventually rebelled, Schoenberg’s very romantic chamber music piece called Transfigured Night is just about as heavily Wagnerian as you can get. It takes Wagner’s ideas about revolutionary harmony and pushes them to the limit, so much so that you can barely get any sense of key or tonality.

Which gave Mr. Schoenberg an idea: If you were going to make it impossible to get a sense of key or tonality anyway, why not just do away with those concepts totally?!?

He had written Transfigured Night in 1898. By 1907 he had embarked on a totally new direction, which he stated as ‘No melody, no harmony, no rhythm. Just pure sound.” All pitches became equally important. No chords. No ‘key.’ No structure based on ‘tunes’ or ‘themes.’

On March 31, 1913, he participated in a concert that featured his new approach. The concert ended halfway through, in uproar. The final piece on the program was to be by Mahler, an audience favorite. They never got that far.

The rich people on the lowest level, closest to the stage, were merely bewildered. The poor people in the balconies? Not so. They knew when they as listeners were no longer valuable. No longer even important. And they didn’t like it. No melody? No harmony? No rhythm? Then what the hell were they there for?

It began as hissing. Then booing. Then cat calls. Laugther, whistling, loud talking. Then it became foot stomping, shouts at the stage, screams of frustration. One person in the audience yelled some sort of epithet at the man who had organized the event, one Erhard Buschbeck. Erhard jumped into the audience and gave the heckler a resounding slap on the face.

It became chaotic. It became a riot.

Ever after, the concert became known as the ‘slap’ concert.

But the real slap was not the one administered by Buschbeck to the heckler. It was the one given by Schoenberg, and his fellow composers Anton Webern and Alban Berg, to the entire audience. If the listeners didn’t matter any more, then what were they doing there?

I think the composers were wrong, and the audience was right. If the former wanted to create organized sound that was not about listening, then do it without an audience!

Now my opinion on this matter is not shared by many modern classical musicians, some of whom have been published here in the pages of Musicality. They say that Debussy was booed at one of his early concerts. That Stravinsky’s premiere of The Rite of Spring was hissed off the stage. The audience just needs to ‘get used to’ the modern and avant-garde, and then all will be well. Just give the listener time. They’ll ‘come around’ eventually. (And in the cases of Debussy and Stravinsky, they did come around. Quickly, in fact.)

But people who say that are forgetting two things: One, Debussy and Stravinsky both cared about the listener. Very much. Two, the science of sound has proven that any given musical pitch is not just a pitch. It is a combination of pitches. Other than the low notes on a flute or the sounds emitted by the narrow sine-wave output of a synthesizer, there is no such thing as a ‘pure pitch.’ Every sound that the human voice makes, or that a piano makes, or that an orchestral instrument makes, is a blend of various pitches. The only one of these that we consciously hear as a pitch is the lowest one, the ‘fundamental.’ But our eardrums hear all of them, separately and together, as a blend. It’s not our ears. It’s our brains. We think we hear one pitch, so that’s what we hear. One pitch.

But our eardrums hear a blend. And here’s the real kicker. That blend isn’t random. It’s made up of the pitches that are contained in a major triad. A major chord. The basis of the idea of having a certain ‘key’ in a musical piece. Every note you ever hear, including every note you ever hear in a piece by Schoenberg, contains a major chord! Whether he likes it not!

[The image at the head of this essay shows an oscilloscope image of the various components that our ears hear as a single pitch.]

The audience didn’t leave classical music. Classical music left the audience.

To this day, every genre of popular music, including Pop, Jazz, Country, Alternative, Heavy Metal, Rock, Hip Hop, and, yes, even Rap, contains sounds that respect this relationship of musical pitches. That’s why they’re popular! Our ears (and brains) understand! The same thing is true of the music of other cultures. Indian raga. Chinese minyue. Irish and/or Appalachian folksong. If classical had been willing to respect our ears and our brains and provide us with sounds that matched what we had to be hearing anyway, for scientific reasons, then classical music would still be popular today!

As it once was!

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