Avant-garde music, or a new sound novel with a drama of the absurd
It is as difficult to define unequivocally what music is, and to satisfy with this definition everyone who has any opinion about it, as it is not easy to explain the nature of being in a couple of sentences. Let's try …
It is as difficult to define unequivocally what music is, and to satisfy with this definition everyone who has any opinion about it, as it is not easy to explain the nature of being in a couple of sentences. Let's try …
Each phenomenon of such a scale and value as music must have a single law or principle by which it exists, by which we can recognize this phenomenon, define and distinguish it from everything else. Knowing the nature of such a gift from God as music will help us learn not to confuse God's gift with scrambled eggs. After all, even scrambled eggs in a situation of hunger, we can feel as a gift from God, thereby creating a false idea of divinity as such.
Melody, harmony, rhythm
Music is that which is composed of three bearing truths: melody, harmony, rhythm.
If all the truths are there, then there is music. And if something is missing from the list - we apologize, this is either a semi-finished product or an experimental product.
These three companions - harmony, melody and rhythm - are wonderfully arranged and complementary. Each melody contains an embryo of harmony and rhythm, each harmonic sequence has a potential rhythm and melody, while rhythm, in turn, can imply the presence of the other two truths, even in the infinity of possibilities. You may notice that there is a very real unity of the constituent parts.
Rhythm is the most ancient and deepest. We get to know the rhythm in the womb. The sound of her heartbeat is the first sensation of our psychic. We feel safe or afraid depending on its rhythm. Through the pulse of the mother, we get the first impressions of our psychic.
In music, the rhythmic dimension also affects our unconscious. If the music is rhythmic, it gives us a sense of stability. If the performer plays irregularly, even the listener who is unfamiliar with the piece of music will feel that the performance is far from perfect. If a piece of music is written rhythmically unpredictably, randomly, with an infinitely changeable rhythmic pattern, the listener is likely to perceive this music as something chaotic, unclear, difficult to remember.
The melody in music is by far the most popular element. This is what some of us whistle or hum in the bathroom in the morning. For most, this is the decisive factor in the popularity of a piece of music: sung in the bathroom in the morning - good music, well, and vice versa …
And why do we have such a warm affection for melodies? Not a drum roll, for example, and not a harmonic chorale? The fact is that the melody is sung with one voice, even if at the moment, perhaps, it is played on the piano or in the orchestra on the trumpet. Melody presupposes a human presence, the presence of "I". It's like the main character in a movie. The melody is about my beloved. Therefore, we love beautiful melodies, well, how we ourselves … it's understandable …
Well, about harmony. It's more obscure though. If rhythm is our ancient group psychic (after all, in the womb we have not yet realized ourselves as an independent living unit), melody, on the contrary, is our perceived “I”, human self, ego, then what is harmony?
Interestingly, the most primitive form of harmony - the triad, or triads - is just two thirds, large and small, sitting on top of one another. We are either in major or minor, depending on which third is at the bottom of the chord.
Now it is necessary to finally remember the tonality! Tonality is a specific field of action where musical events take place. Harmonic sequences can dwell in it. The fact is that each chord at different levels of the key has its own color, its own relationship with other chords. It is like a family, at each level a relative. Happy and prosperous - major, and somewhat sad - minor. And it happens, and one completely limited - reduced - about nothing else and can not think, just how to resolve in a stable tonal relative. The whole drama between "relatives" takes place in the tension between dominance and plagiarism. The dominant pulls in tension to increase and to increase sharps, the plugality pulls in the opposite direction, decreasing the intensity as it goes in the direction of flats. All the harmoniesor chords, need the rest to manifest their nature. Returning to the tonic at the end of a phrase or piece feels like returning home. We feel relieved and … relaxed …
Why not life in a family or in some other unit of society? It turns out that harmony in music is about our relationship. Either outside, in society, or inside, in our inner world. And here and there there are connections, relationships, tensions and relaxation, even modulations into other tonalities, if there is little room for the inner disclosure of all the necessary relationships.
So, we come closer to revealing the subject of this essay.
Early 20th century
Victorianism raised the moral values of marriage to an unattainable height: the legs of home furniture are chastely covered with skirts made of shuttlecocks, so as not to lead observers into sin. At the same time, prostitution is growing to an unprecedented scale, which was not observed either before or after Victorianism …
For the first time, the family as a holy and indestructible unit of society is defeated. Mutations in marital and extramarital relationships begin. Ahead are social, political and militaristic mutations.
On the verge of the 19th and 20th centuries, classical music, completing its period of late romanticism, exhausted its harmonious development due to the impossibility of further complication. Tonality, like the family, seemed to have come to an end.
In 1908, Arnold Schoenberg, a German composer, experiences a personal tragedy: his wife cheats on him with his close friend, who later commits suicide after learning of her decision to return to her husband and child. These difficult events force the composer to come to a new musical idea: atonality. Farewell, family - tonality, where there is a return home - tonic - and a whole system of relationships between the participating levels of tonality and harmonies.
Now we will have equality of steps and there will be no leader - tonic. All the steps will be on their own without any priority. No step will somehow rise above others. We will dwell in a musical abstraction, where there is no ranking between 12 equal tones …
Schönberg had students and followers. This flow of dodecaphony continued until about 1945. This was the first time music went beyond tonality.
After the Second World War, the "avant-garde" movement in music began, and this word was often used to refer to even mutually exclusive phenomena.
In the Soviet Union, a wave of avant-garde swept from the 60s to the 80s. Schnittke, Gubaidulina and others studied the works of Western avant-garde artists and enriched their musical language, deepening their ideas and concepts. The Soviet avant-garde did not receive much encouragement from government circles, but it had many ardent admirers among musicians and intellectuals of the time. One remarkable Moscow musician once said about one of the programs of a concert of avant-garde music: "It's not a pity to sit down for such a program."
It remained in the last century … Nowadays, avant-garde music continues itself mainly from a formal perspective: innovation is at the forefront. Although, in fact, innovation as such is no longer observed. "Music" without rhythm, melody and harmony rushes at the speed of sound in the direction of the artificial drama of the absurd without any additional specified qualities. There is a certain group of people who are very addicted to it. Who are they, these people thirsty for filling with sound, hungry for sound sensations?
The sound vector, according to the system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan, is the last and most colossal measure in the disclosure of the human psychic. 6 thousand years ago, the first person with a sound vector appeared and realized himself as a separate “I” independent of the flock.
Before the appearance of sound specialists, separation from the pack was equal to death. The landscape made tough demands on early people in those difficult times, and the expression of one's individuality was not the main task of our ancestor six thousand years ago, until he realized himself as a sound engineer and felt his "I" in the silence of the savannah.
Sound specialists are people for whom the hearing organs are an erogenous zone. Fulfilling their specific role in the flock, they … listen to the silence of the night, protecting the flock from enemy attacks. Nowadays, the sound people bend over the computer in the desired silence of the night, when everyone is already asleep. In previous years, they successfully filled a huge volume of the sound vector with music, poetry, physics, mathematics. Nowadays, music and poetry no longer provide adequate content: the volume of the sound vector has increased and the sound engineer, exhausted by the unfilled voids, simply wants silence. But silence is not eternal either …
The real specific role of the sound engineer lies in deep concentration and awareness - cognition of oneself, cognition of the divine presence, the meaning of life, one's immortal soul, psychic …
All the sublimants and modalities of filling sound voids are ineffective these days: the volumes of the sound measure are colossal and unfulfilled desires are growing. It is clear as daylight that at the moment we, representatives of the sound measure, are not coping with our metaphysical task. The sound vector is universally in poor condition. Many sound professionals get sick, the number of drug users has increased, suicides have increased, children are born with autism, and some sound people who fall into a state of secondary autism end their lives on this planet with machine guns or explosives in their hands, taking the lives of innocent people by force …
Unrealized sound often leads to depression, and some of us try to drown out our bad states by hiding in the sound capsules of modern avant-garde music …
There we can go into what, in fact, music cannot be called … These are definitely electronic sound effects, often enhanced by visual effects … but then we can concentrate on ourselves … to probe our psyche for wounds and pain points and calm the nerves that have been limit to our unsatisfied demands of silence and loneliness …
Is it easy to be a sound engineer? To be or not to be … a sound engineer … How to be … a sound engineer …
Sound scientists appeared the last in a series of disclosures of our psychic. Our sound vector is still awaiting its full realization. Music as a way of filling it is gradually disappearing, but you should not nervously turn off classical music recordings or stop playing musical instruments. If you are still drawn to listen to … real music, with harmony, melody and rhythm, listen while it gives you fulfillment. Even (good) pop music can bring temporary relief to an audio engineer by drowning out audible alarms with "love" visuals. To play music, and not to consume it passively, would help the sound engineer to take himself out, concentrating simultaneously on the sound outside and on his feelings inside.
Avant-garde listeners do not need to reproach themselves for their "musical addiction." The current avant-garde, which sound people can get hooked on, has nothing to do with music. "Drama of the Absurd", one of the varieties of the post-war avant-garde, could adorn its name with sound concoctions, which you will find in considerable quantities on YouTube for free and on the Internet for money.
I tried to scroll through some of them … listening to these toxic sonic pleasures with immersion would be just a self-destructive act …
If real, full-blooded music is an expression of a thirst for life, or a libido, the avant-garde pieces that I tried to listen to, in my sense, express the qualities of mortido, or a thirst for death.
Why do we hear about so many regrets that they have started listening to the avant-garde, but feel that they cannot throw away the headphones? They themselves are frightened by their addiction and are under stress from the realization that they have such a sound addiction …
There is no need to be afraid, as the saying goes, "what does not kill us will make us stronger." If you can handle this music, you must have a good headroom. It is more important to understand what internal shortcomings have brought you to this electronic attraction.
By the way, the same "music" will tell you about them. It screams, pops, rustles, creaks and even blinks like a blown-out street lamp, for some reason reminiscent of a torture chamber, of a lack of harmony and connection with reality. This avant-garde will continue to defend our sound rights to our arrogance, to our opinion that we are the smartest and that our sense of absolute superiority over others is fully justified by personal extraordinary and, in especially difficult cases, even imaginary genius, praising our separation from the rest, hatred for a world that does not understand us, the right to dislike, which so often ends for a sound engineer with voluntary or involuntary loneliness …
Do you want to know what alternatives you have and what is the potential for development and successful filling of the sound vector? Come to Yuri Burlan's training and start studying system-vector psychology.
