A Tantalizing Argument

While reviewing David Stubbs' Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen, Philip Ball offers up a truly tantalizing explanation for the phenomenon:

...the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of music that has emerged in recent years implies that it is not enough to tell ingrates bemused by Stockhausen to try harder.

There are certainly parallels in the way we make sense of acoustic and visual information. Chief among these rules are the “Gestalt principles” identified by a group of German-based psychologists in the early 20th century. These are a series of implicit mental rules that help people to make good guesses at how to interpret complex sensory stimuli by grouping them together. We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side. We group objects that look similar, or that are close together. Although the Gestalt principles are not foolproof, they make the world more comprehensible. Both in sound and in vision, the ability to interpret sensory data this way must have had evolutionary benefits. -- Philip Ball

That's a nifty argument, which immediately brings to mind Steve Martin, of all people.

In his recent memoir about his stand-up career, Martin explained how he set about doing precisely what Ball describes. Instead of delivering jokes with punchlines that cued the audience to laugh, he deliberately tried to avoid a punchline for as long as possible. His idea was simply to keep the audience's tension so high as they looked for a punchline to laugh at that they'd start to laugh at anything. His act got so big that he ended up doing balloon animals in stadiums like a jerk. You can abandon Gestalt principles and still make a killing.

And come to think of it, Stockhausen was selling out venues all over the world in his prime. The dude walked away from his rock star status to write Licht, which highlights the critical blind spot of all these endless arguments about the problems with new music:

taste

An old professor of mine was fond of relating a horror story from the board meetings of a chamber orchestra he founded. One of the trustees insisted that the orchestra not play Schubert. No matter how my professor tried to explain the importance of Schubert and the absurdity of an orchestra eschewing his music, the trustee was insistent.

Those kinds of divisions exist all over classical music. I inherited a distaste for Mahler from my mother, which I didn't shake until I was in grad school. At any classical music concert, you'll find people who can't stand Wagner or think Bach is dry, and if you go further afield, even the most popular classics leave the general public totally unmoved.

There are no hard and fast rules for taste. Popularity gaps can be both big and small. Many fans of popular music would consider gangsta rap and hardcore metal to be 'noise'. One could just as readily hear a Garth Brooks fan say that they don't 'get' why anyone would like George Jones.

Plenty of people 'get' Stockhausen. The assumption that if Stockhausen had written in the style of Mozart or Beethoven he would have been more widely understood is specious. It's a nice way to sell books and perpetuate academic debates. Sadly, it's also often a crutch by performers to not engage with their audience.

I'm not ready to say that all this theorizing is tiresome, but it does strike me as wide of the mark. The market for contemporary classical music in the Stockhausen vein has established itself as small but devoted, akin to some sub-genre of indie rock or jazz. I'm not sure why people keep banging their heads against the wall over why it's not more popular. It's doing just fine.