Cosmic Determinism

Peter Maxwell Davies closed his April whingefest (which he quite accurately assessed as 'superfluous, though...in part of some interest') with a determinist argument that 'every moment we deal with this great music, we are privileged to participate in cosmic harmony'. To save you 6,000 words or so, by 'this great music', he does not have in mind The Stooges or Chamillionaire.

But, taking this cosmic model, of which we've always been fond (what's the Earth supposed to be humming, a big C#?), at its face, what comes to mind is Schoenberg's version. He argued that our ears would evolve to a point where we heard what he heard: that harmonies of seconds and clusters are not dissonant at all but derived from the overtone series.



After all, the fourth used to be considered a dissonance, no? And we evolved from there to be able to deal with triads, sevenths, and ninths (Oh My!). Clearly, according to Schoenberg, we'll work our way up the God-given harmonic series to a point where even the most batshit-looking harmony strikes us as a consonance.

There's a beautiful logic to that argument, and to marry the two, it seems to us that if you're going to buy into Davies' elitism-for-the-sake-of-populism argument, you'd want to at least get pop music in on the ground floor. For God's sake, give them the first octave at least, or up through the triad, even. Instead of shutting popular music out of the 'cosmic harmony' entirely, it seems that he'd strengthen his argument by giving it rank with the lower, more thunderously obvious harmonics, and cling to Schoenberg's notion that higher brows hear higher tones.

We don't particularly care one way or the other. We tend to think that humans aren't bound to any system in particular, given a chance. Davies is an exceptionally brilliant man and a terribly underperformed composer, and it's quite nice to see his name popping up all over the blogoshpere.