Friday: Music Appreciation With the Whacked-Out OG

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Even though Arnold Schoenberg said that JS Bach was "paradoxically speaking, the first twelve-tone composer," Arnold was being a tad hyperbolic: Bach did not use a tone row. (Although see HERE for dissentual data.) Schoenberg seems to want to claim Bach for his side, for which I will quote William S. Burroughs completely out of context: "Wouldn't you?"

Here's a 2 minute video briefly explaining this 20th century theory in music, with a charming female British accent:

Okay. So, there's a bit of academic kerfuffle about who first "really" used the chromatic scale in such a way. Some say Bartok. A case has been made for Scriabin. In my view a stronger case has been made for Hauer, but I'll go with the conventional wisdom and pick Schoenberg.

Leonard Bernstein, influenced by Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories, said that humans hear serial music as noisy, because we have something like a "deep structure" to apprehend music, too. In this widely held view, the experiments with seriality by (mostly American) composers only appeal to highly-trained academic ears. You, Dear Reader, likely do not dig dodecaphonic music either, and it's not your fault, according to this theory, which in Chomskyan terms, is like throwing a bunch of phonemes together randomly and concocting a "language"...it doesn't work that way. But still...

[Side note: Bernstein himself used dodecaphony in his Third Symphony, Kaddish, in order to depict the "tremendous agony" in a dialogue with God. He reverted to tonality within that piece, because it symbolized for him "affirmation of faith."]

Here's one of my favorite guitarists in the world. He's a very cerebral heavy metal player, and I'm working on a longer piece about him for some other site. His name is Ron Jarzombek, and here he is, explaining the guitar parts in his band Blotted Science's piece "Oscillation Cycles." It's 8:15, if you can hang with it:

In my opinion, Schoenberg's system has finally found its most congenial atmosphere, here in math and musical theory geek Jarzombek's whacked metal mind. I think this guy's genius is firing on all cylinders, oscillating. Likely most of you will disagree. "What a bunch of NOISE! How can you listen to that crap?" If you think that, fine. You're with the majority. But my aim was to get you to see, in the wonderful oddity of things, how the delicate and tortured freak-genius Schoenberg has flowered in the most unlikely of places, roughly 80 years after he revealed a freshly delineated Whole New Ballgame for thinking about how to use the 12 notes in the Western system.

You're welcome. (ELL OH! ELL)

Now, for the .00003 of you who LIKE this stuff, here's the actual Oscillation Cycles, in all its 1:40 glory, the whole band, just killing (I don't think I need to caution viewers in a library that you might want to lower the volume):

ENJOY!

IF I've jarred your nervous system into some tangle or jangle and you're feeling unpleasant now, I apologize and offer this to bring you back into harmony, both glandular and psychologic stasis regained, we hope:

I hope that helps. If it doesn't, and your Jarzombek-frazzledness persists for four hours, contact your doctor. Ta!