THE DETERGENT SCHOOL OF COMPOSITION

Divine Scripture teaches us that "There is no new thing under the sun," and for a very long time this was true. During the late nineteenth century the automobile was developed, but it was only a horseless carriage, with an internal or external combustion engine replacing the beast of burden. Prior to that horseless carriages propelled by clockwork and springs had been tried, and before that wind and sails.

I would judge the first completely new thing to be the radio, as nothing remotely like it had been in existence one-hundred years earlier. The allied invention of the Audion tube by Lee de Forest began the control of electromagnetic waves and the flow of electrons, developments which eventually resulted in the very computer at which you are now staring. All previous inventions were merely improvements on existing devices. Gears and pulleys were known since ancient times, and the steam engine was nothing more than an aeolipile harnessed to perform work.

The twentieth century saw more new things that had not previously existed—flying machines, the realization that particles rather than bonds could be turned into energy by splitting or fusing atoms, genetic engineering and biotechnology—and many products began appearing with the words NEW! and IMPROVED! emblazoned on the packaging. This was evidence of a basically different way of thinking, as no one had ever thought that basic commodities such as bread, beer, grits or salt could be improved, much less new.

Nowhere was this different attitude of the twentieth century more apparent than in music. In all ages past, music had developed organically; it had gradually evolved along Darwinian principles. If one was to play the music of the ars nova and contrast it with a motet of the previous century, it would, to the untutored ear, not sound dramatically different. Even so radical a composer as Richard Wagner, with his gaudy theories of "The Art Form of the Future," owed much of his style to that of his antecedents Meyerbeer and von Weber. Wagner borrowed heavily from a composer he admired, Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861), and he even used Marschner's melodies.

Music had always evolved because music is organic in nature, but in the twentieth century, once the difference between matter and energy was shown to be ambiguous, once time itself became subject to the principle of relativity, and with the advent of quantum mechanics with its terrible Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that upset Einstein, even the smartest among us could not be certain about anything, and it seemed likely that life itself could be reduced to a series of chemical reactions involving complex proteins.

It is no coincidence, then, that in the twentieth century, humans became obsessed with robots—the word robot was coined by Karel Capek in his 1921 play, R.U.R. Movies and television shows became fascinated with the future and were thus infested with robots, and this reached an apogee with HAL, the megalomaniac personality in the 1967 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But nowhere was this loss of distinction between organic and inorganic, between living things and mechanical things, more apparent than in music.

Composers have traditionally based their works on folk music or the popular melodies of their land and time. My favorite example of this is the banal pop tune that Beethoven used as the opening theme of his Eroica symphony, but this practice is no less common in the music of J. S. Bach, and lately music scholars have shown how the themes in Le Sacre du printemps are actually derived from Russian folk melodies. Even the Violin Concerto of Alban Berg contains a Carinthian folk tune as well as Lutheran chorale interspersed with the tone row.

Berg's Violin Concerto was written in 1935, but afterward, classical music gradually abandoned its genetic heritage. Art music no longer evolved out of the regional culture like an organic, living thing, but it was now invented as if it was something more akin to technology. Rather than being based on folk melodies, music was now devised by means of a theory. Suddenly, there was a new concept called "experimental music." It was said that everything that could possibly be said using tonality had been exhausted, so the theory of serialism was advanced, and when that proved insufficiently revolutionary, John Cage introduced music based on his aleatory theory. Composition is now done on graph paper using algorhythms.

Music is also now the product of the laboratory. In the last three decades, France has spent a fortune building and maintaining (fifteen million francs each year) the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique. This laboratory, formerly under the direction of Dr. Pierre Boulez, was built underground in a bunker—like a nuclear reactor. It seems that France, having lagged behind the United States in discovering the new rare earth elements, and behind the Russian Tokomak fusion reactor, decided to build their own reactor to corner the market in discovering new forms of music.

Despite the huge expense and large staff, not much has been produced by the IRCAM. They have one of the worst web sites ever devised and there has been the annual Agora Festival, "a pluridisciplinary event," but for the most part, the IRCAM has been about as beneficial as the discovery of cold fusion.

The problem with employing such means to create music is obvious. Using theories or a laboratory to create music will always be as successful as using them to create a flower or a child. If music was a electromechanical device like a computer, it could be completely new and divergent. But music, like language, is an organic thing, and it must evolve and incorporate what came before. No new animal ever suddenly appeared, and even Esperanto was based on Spanish. Instead, like all living things, music must evolve. There can be no absolutely new music, just as there can be no new form of life. Human beings have genes in common with yeast, and although humans have a new forebrain, we also have a hypothalamus and all the parts of a reptile brain. Our brains are fundamentally no different from those of animals; we merely have structures added on like dormers or carports on a house.

Music must likewise be based on what came before it. The music of Hindemith subsumes the music of Brahms which, in turn, includes Beethoven which encompasses the music of Handel which contains the music of Palestrina and on back to Pythagoras and before. The great masters were not merely influenced by their immediate predecessors, but by all music and everything that came before them. Wagner may have assimilated the style of Marschner while Brahms was more influenced by Schumann, but each man's style evolved out of previously existing ideas and patterns.

Most modern composers seem to have no understanding or respect for this process, so they are trying to invent music, rather than grow it. There should be Bach in all music today and Duke Ellington in all music and Josquin des Prez and Xavier Cugat and Mussorgsky and the genes (or, to use the term of Oxford smartie, Richard Dawkins, memes) of every musical antecedent, but instead, modern composers subscribe to what I'd call the detergent school of composition. Each piece must be NEW! and IMPROVED! with a SECRET INGREDIENT! and like nothing else heard before. They are trying for a product which makes all other music passé and obsolete. They want their music to parallel the breakthroughs of the laboratory.

Also like modern cleaning products, composers want the new music to be antiseptic. All residue of sweat and filth must be eliminated, and this means eradicating all traces of emotion. New music must be emotionally sterile, and I have no doubt that there will soon be a "revolutionary" new piece in which the composer specifies that the performers wear biohazard suits during performance as an artistic statement.

Darwinian principles had the same effect on music as they do on any organic thing. At one time parallel fifths, fourths and octaves were accepted and even common in music. At some point someone realized that a fugue sounds much better if they are absent and that contrary motion was much more pleasing to the ear. The superiority of this new style won out, and parallel fifths became extinct for hundreds of years, reintroduced only for an oriental effect. As music evolved, the most effective and pleasing techniques won out and became the norm. I am interested in the music of all cultures and societies, but the rapid and successful evolution of Western music made it the most advanced and successful in the world. Symphony orchestras were organized throughout the Orient, sometimes by Westerners, but often by natives who recognized a good thing when they heard it.

This is why experimental music, the detergent school of composition, is superfluous. The essentials of western music were established by a trial-and-error process which lasted over centuries. Natural selection weeded-out what didn't work, and what was left is the classical repertoire that we admire. In his book The Craft of Musical Composition the great Paul Hindemith explains, in terms of physics, just why it is that tonality is essential to music and why our system of music works so well. But that is about as interesting as the chemistry of why a ripe tomato tastes so good. All we really need to know is that, by imitating what was pleasing and convincing and by discarding what was weak and ineffective, Western music became the most advanced music in the world. No experiments or laboratories or bold new theories or revolutionary discoveries were needed.

Technology can benefit music by providing new and more effective instruments, but as for the substance of music—tonality, harmony, form, rhythm—that can only improve through evolution.