I am in the Numinbah Valley, on the Gold Coast Hinterland, tagging along on a music therapy retreat my partner helped to organise. I took the opportunity to come along and catch up on some reading while the workshops went on. I have mainly been trying to get through Henry Cowell’s “New Musical Resources” and Daniel Levitin’s “This is Your Brain on Music”.

I have found Cowell’s book really interesting as it puts into theoretical language a lot of things that I have “known” for a long time in a tacit way – without knowing that there was theory & terminology out there for it.

His ideas about polyrhythm relating to pitch & harmony are really interesting. I am getting into the bit about polyharmony now which is a bit more out there… It is an interesting way of thinking but I think I’ll be reluctant to integrate it into my compositions.

It has got me thinking a lot about musical trends. The way every generation is drawn to different sounds. Cowell discussed the way we have come to appreciate more & complex harmony over hundreds of years. Ancient Greeks heard anything except octave & unison as dissonant, and since then the list of acceptable harmonies – intervals we find to be consonant – has grown dramatically. In addition to this, as more complex harmony becomes favourable, simpler harmony falls out of favour. Parallel fifths for example are considered to be unpleasant in classical theory because of their primitiveness.

The graph above is my visual interpretation of this idea. On the vertical axis I’ve put the complexity of the harmony, and the horizontal is time. The orange band in the middle represents the ideal harmonic palette for a given culture at a given time. As this palette increases in complexity, we also see simpler harmony falling out of favour into the blue section, where it is considered to be less interesting.

Given these patterns, we can predict that harmonies that we now find dissonant may be appreciated as consonant some time in the future.

With this in mind, I’m wondering where the average listener is at in 2010 in terms of what harmonies we like. Is the average listener able to enjoy Schoenberg? I’d probably say they are not. And despite many people having an appreciation of atonal or post-tonal music, I would say that many of those people would also happily listen to pop & rock music as well. The music of the Beatles is extremely simple, and yet most people haven’t yet moved past that kind of harmony.

This is obviously applicable only to a particular place or culture in the world, however I imagine the tastes of every culture would develop along similar lines, despite all being wildly different. I think one culture’s incorporation of another culture’s unfamiliar harmony is a move upward in the graph.

I’m just making this up as I go along, by the way…

You can kind of relate this taste for harmony to taste for food. As children we enjoy simple, strong flavours like lollies & tomato sauce. And as we grow up we learn to appreciate more complex & challenging flavours such as red wine & olives. And if we ever reach the stage where our favourite food is blue cheese, we would probably no longer enjoy tomato sauce.

My theory about 20th century music, especially the music of the serialism and post-tonalism is that we finally began to understand the way our tastes grow, the way something that was once dissonant can be seen as consonant in a different time & place. With this newfound knowledge we recognised that what we now find dissonant may be found to be consonant in the future. Therefore, music which is dissonant to us, was also considered to be more advanced.

I think Western music in the 20th century can be likened to a fifteen year old who has suddenly become aware of the pattern of development of the palate. With this understanding she decides that the most sophisticated and advanced foods must be those that she has not yet learnt to enjoy. Showing off to her friends, she picks the blue cheese from the cheese platter, and holds back a grimace while she eats it, saying “Mmm, tastes good”. But she will be looking forward to having some cheddar when she gets home…

This is not to say that 20th century classical is all a rouse and no-one really likes it, and they just pretend to like it to appear sophisticated (Although that would be a fun argument to put forward). I think that 20th century classical music can always be appreciated in its context, even if the harmony is alienating. Anyone can still enjoy the timbral painting and the soundscape it creates, and as John Cage suggested, we are all capable of appreciating any sound if we are open-minded enough. And if we can’t enjoy the harmony & melody, we can still find a lot of enjoyment in the timbre, rhythm, dynamics, form, etc. My argument is only that atonal harmony is pitching above its audience.

I’m sure that most people who went to see an orchestra play atonal music on the weekend still have Beatles CDs in their car. If we are ready for such complex harmony, shouldn’t the Beatles have slipped into the “intolerably boring” category by now? Apparently not.

I am sure this isn’t true for everyone – I imagine there are many people who truly enjoy and understand the most advanced harmony the 20th and 21st centuries have to offer. But the success of the minimalists and the ubiquity of simple pop music suggests that many are passing on the blue cheese and heading back to the cheddar.

Moving back to the analogy of the fifteen year old, my advice to her would be to challenge her tastes as much as she can, but there’s no need to pretend she likes something that she doesn’t. By all means, try the camembert or a sip of your mum’s wine, and develop your palate naturally. Because after all, the point of the whole thing is to enjoy it, right?

I hope to see in the 21st century a natural development of harmonic taste. Not a return to traditional harmony at all, and not a blind leap forward for the sake of leaping forward, but an enjoyable play within the gamut of harmony we currently appreciate, and a constant and gentle push upward towards complexity.