Democractic diatonics

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

davemarc comments:
"I'm not sure that I'd want to call the challenge to diatonicism (or, to be
more precise, tonality) "democratization."  I think I understand the
intended meaning; I just wonder whether we could agree upon a better word.
Notes aren't people, after all; in addition, I'd say that "the people" still
tend to go for music that is tonal--though most of "the people" don't tear
their hair out when they sing off-key in the shower or RV and most of "the
people" readily accept departures from tonality used for expressive purposes
(say, when a harmonica player or jazz saxophonist "bends" notes)."


I think the debate (which also incorporates the allusions to Webern) reflects
some of the arguments made by Horkheimer and Adorno in THE DIALECTIC OF
ENLIGHTENMENT, particularly the chapter on "The Culture Industry."  To
paraphrase badly and bluntly, the two suggest that the Western harmonic
tradition leads one to to a form of ideological acceptance, and that popular
music (including jazz!) does so even more--reducing complexities to simplicities,
while the rigor of Schoenberg's atonality requires an intellectual distance,
does not privilege one set of musical arrangements over another.  (I doubt
that they would be any more sanguine about Rossini than Beethoven.  All 
such music, they might argue, finally leads toward the Wagnerian gesamtkunst-
werk--the total work of art that totally encloses and detaches one from
reality.)

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)