“To say of a piece that it is harsh, dry , acid, and unrelenting is to praise it. While to call it sweet and graceful is to damn it”. Puzzled Menotti remarked. “I have dared to do away completely with all fashionable dissonance, and …to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the pleasure of sweet”. He continued, resolutely affirming his position.
Menotti (full name Gian-Carlo Menotti) was a 20th century Italian composer who lived through the period in musical history where leading composers at that time were adopting avant-garde techniques in the composition of musical pieces. These avant-garde techniques relied heavily on formal and standardized styles and system, more like mathematical generators in creating and composing notes and musical scores (the twelve tone system for example).
These pieces which were void of human creativity were as a result also lacking in creativity, beauty and familiarity. One historian referred to them as being, “…atonal music that was highly discordant and jarring to the ear−pieces the public did not like and could not understand.” These were the kind of music that professional and leading composers of Menotti’s day were making, “pieces the public did not like”.
But why the reversal? Why all of a sudden did top composers make a U-turn from making something appealing to the public to making something disconnected from the public mind and understanding of lovers of music? This had something to do with a shift in the philosophy of his day, where art was given a new meaning and redefined according to logic alone (thinking) rather than inspiration (feeling). So their goal was not to be popular, entertain the audience or bless the soul of the people (as the Christians will say) but to demonstrate their commitment to a set of guidelines and principles upheld by the neomusical movement of the day. Hence the reason why they enjoyed the fact that the public did not like nor understand their composition as it was a far-cry from the contemporary music of the day.
With the understanding and relatability of their musical composition taken off the level of the understanding of the common person, it gave them a sense of more weight being thrown in for them as highly professional composers, and music, their music especially, as being a complex and technical field like biology, chemistry, arts, medicine, engineering, law, to name a few, that required at least some level of training.
Like Menotti said, “To say of a piece that it is harsh, dry , acid, and unrelenting is to praise it. While to call it sweet and graceful is to damn it”. When composers played what was “…easy and light”, beautiful and lovable, it was criticized, seen as “selling out for the sake of money”, deemed unprofessional and an act of courting the musically unlearned public in exchange for some “…measure of popular success” at the expense of “…esteem in the profession”. This group were regarded by the “professionals” as not being “…significant contributors to musical history”. Beauty indeed was despised as beast.
Menotti knew what the public were saying. It puzzled him how dissonance became fashionable, art praised and hailed when it was harsh and offensive, and why the majority of the composers of his day had rejected the very concept of beauty. Nevertheless he stood on a ground contrary to the consensus of the musical elites of his day, to dare “…to do away completely with fashionable dissonance, and …to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the pleasure of sweetness”.
Beauty despised as beast 1 (To be
continued…)
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