If I can drag you away from your analogy for a moment - no, it's impossible.

Well then, allowing that playing tonal music together requires agreement on a key, it does not follow that such agreement requires an authority beyond the authority of the agreement. We can agree on a key without that it is your key or my key. One uses a tuning fork, but it does not exert it's authority to demand that you be in tune with it, it is a simple tool.

With an objective referent!

What are people's views on Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique? As I understand it, there is no home key in that form.
At the time (1920s) plenty of people protested that it was not music. I think the majority of musicians these days accept it as music.

Actually, that's a good point andrew. Some of the most unconventional Jazz improvisation (Ornette Colemn, for one, springs to mind but I could be wrong) utilizes the chromatic or whole-tone scale, and the harmonies are determined solely by what sounds right, and probably structural ( on the piano at least) contiguities. I like to improvise on the piano this way; and I often ask myself "But is this really music or am I kind of cheating?" But if it sounds good, then that's a sufficient criteria to deem it music, right? Of course, there's no accounting for taste, though...
;).

'if it feels good, do it' ~ Linda Lovelace

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?

Actually I think there is nothing wrong with pleasure, per se; but that the problem lies with attachment to pleasure, and the neurotic search for gratification that it motivates.

Not even that. Attachment to pleasure is fine, sometimes even to a point of a neurotic search for gratification. People function with obsessive hobbies all the time.

Problems only lie in the wider context, in how a search for pleasure is harms themselves or others.

Yeah, attachment to pleasure is fine, until you become addicted to it, until you can't get it, or you tire of what pleasures you, or you kill someone because they are depriving you or standing in your way, or you objectify someone and think of them, even if only subconsciously, as being there for your pleasure, and so on. Sure, if no problems arise from attachment to pleasure, then there is no problem with it; that much is taulogically true.

Some of the most unconventional Jazz improvisation (Ornette Colemn, for one, springs to mind but I could be wrong) utilizes the chromatic or whole-tone scale, and the harmonies are determined solely by what sounds right, and probably structural ( on the piano at least) contiguities. I like to improvise on the piano this way; and I often ask myself "But is this really music or am I kind of cheating?" — John

I saw a sensational free jazz concert one evening (decades back), when a friend had a spare ticket. It was totally improvisational, not "jazz standards", but a virtual cacophony of rythms and sonic experiments by a band I've never heard of before or since called The Art Ensemble of Chicago.



It was a one-of-a-kind experience and it made me realise how powerful 'free jazz' could be.

But in terms of listening to recorded music, or going to the kinds of performances I generally want to see, I have never been able to dig avante garde. It is no doubt a matter of taste, but it also involves judgements as to what constitutes artistic expression, what music really is, or isn't. And that again is analogous to questions of ethical judgement. In fact I think, like other critics of avant garde, that it subverts the artistic endeavour by erasing the distinction between what is artful, and what is not. I suppose, to utilise some of Apokrisis' terminology, it tries to 'do away with constraints' - and in so doing, it does away with meaning. I feel the same way about a lot of abstract impressionism and many other facets of modern culture. (Call me a dinosaur, I've had worse.)

What are people's views on Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique? As I understand it, there is no home key in that form.
At the time (1920s) plenty of people protested that it was not music. I think the majority of musicians these days accept it as music. — andrewk

I like some twelve-tone music, such as Berio and Boulez. The claim that it's not music is not one I take seriously.

However, I think its important influence was an expansion of the tools available to composers in terms of technique and expressive range, so that composers now feel free to switch between tonality and atonality even within the same work. Examples might be Nørgård and Penderecki. Certainly, many contemporary composers make great use of atonality or unusual modal structures in a way that is deeply indebted to the twelve-tone movement.

I don't think the technique was all it was cracked up to be, and I can't imagine that music will ever dispense with tonal centres entirely, as some of those composers liked to imagine.

There does seem to me a clear difference between ethical and artistic judgement. If you don't like music I like - if you don't even call it music - what's it to me? I just won't invite you to my atonal abstract mashups.

But ethical judgments matter even if only one of you thinks it's ethical. Something will happen, or not happen, and it will count. I remember when I was 16 years old being told by an ardent Communist that some deaths of bourgeois lackeys were a practical necessity. That's not what I call music.

Of course, here we may just be prattling about art and ethics, signifying nothing. But judgments that lead to decisions do matter.

I have heard of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but I can't remember where from or what their music sounds like. I must admit that when I listen to music, it is usually some form of rock music ( I actually love some music related to the punk and and heavy rock or metal genres; whether proto, pre or post and even some electronic, techno or trance music as well). On of my favorite music of all time is that produced by Radiohead. Or I might listen to one of the older classical composers (I mean up to and including Shostakovitch). While I can appreciate the sheer intellectual inventiveness of some of the most experimental modern 'serious' music, and some of the more intuitive inventiveness, athleticism and rhythmical excellence of the most free jazz; those are not what I usually choose to listen to for musical pleasure or inspiration. I wouldn't generally choose to sit down and listen to Schoenberg or Cage for example for either pleasure or inspiration.

Where I would diverge from your opinion is that I like some of the Abstract Expressionist and other modernist works, and I think the constraints are always there in the form of tonal, chromatic and spatial relationships. The visual arts are interestingly different to music in that there are no strictly formalized structural rules to begin with. The constraints in the visual arts are more to do with the natures of the materials; the grounds, pigments, mediums and so on; and of course the subject to be presented. There is always a subject to be presented in even the most 'abstract' works.

An interesting analogy to free music to look at, in terms of the idea of working under less constraint, is free verse. Milton's Paradise Lost for example, generally considered to be one of the greatest poems in English, is, interestingly, written in free verse form.

It occurs to me that even playing atonal music requires agreement on two parameters, and hence is not toally free of constraints - provided it is within the 'well-tempered' framework that is used for Western music.

Those parameters are (1) the frequency of a reference note - say A4=440Hz, and (2) the standard distance between notes, which in a well-tempered system is determined as a frequency ratio between adjacent notes equal to the twelfth root of two (referred to as a 'semitone').

Sliding and non-fretted instruments, and voice, need not be limited to that, but instruments with keys are, although a very skilled player can 'bend' the notes on a wind instrument.

Bending aside, every note playen in an atonal piece within a well-tempered framework has a frequency of the form 440 x 2^(k/12) for some integer k.

Indian music uses quarter-tones, but that just doubles the richness of the framework, so that any notes of the form 440 x 2^(k/24) can be used. There is still a constraining framework.

I wonder what an 'absolutely free' performance would sound like, in which notes of any frequency were played.

I'll try to defend this post against potential protestations of irrelevance on the grounds that it shows that even when we think we are being completely free of frameworks, we often find that we are still within a framework that we hadn't noticed. That can apply to morals as much as to music.

Yes, the kinds of basic constraints you are referring to here seem to be analogous to the kinds of constraints operating in visual art practice I spoke about. For example, the nature of any musical instrument is constrained by natural harmonics and the way they are modified by the materials the instrument is constructed of, just as the natures of pigmented media are constrained by natural chromatics, and the physical properties of the materials that constitute the medium. The difference though is that in the case of the former the harmonics are more obviously also modified by the form of the construction, in addition to the properties of the material of construction.

I'm a Steely Dan tragic. Apart from that, mainly modern jazz, I have my web radio tuned into the Current Jazz channel on http://www.jazzradio.com . I got drawn into jazz by an excellent radio show that used to play in Sydney from 10:00pm every evening, Music till Midnight. And also by the musical literacy of jazz soloists (I remember that I could always pick Oscar Peterson by sound even when i was about 7).

I haven't studied Milton, in fact this discussion is making me painfully aware of the many thousands of things that I haven't studied. But I think I'll stick by my general aversion to modernism. Not that I am going to join the Amish, or anything, but sometimes, I can sympathise.