“An Overwhelming Feeling of Confusion”: The Brain and Atonal Music
I was referred last week to an interesting article by a fellow CFAMC composer. It talks about a new book by Philip Ball called The Music Instinct, in which he finds that there’s a neurological reason why people find it hard to enjoy atonal music by Schoenberg, Webern and the like. Apparently our brains are always looking for patterns in the music we listen to, and while music by Bach, Mozart and other classical composers naturally has the sort of organization that lends itself to pattern recognition, the music of twentieth century atonal composers is devoid of such patterns. (An interesting quote: “We measured the predictability of tone sequences in music by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and found the successive pitches were less predictable than random tone sequences.”) To his credit, though, Ball qualifies, “That isn’t to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket.” It reminds me of something my piano teacher at Cal State Fullerton used to say: he said that he enjoyed listening to modern, avant-garde music–as long as he was in the mood to work hard enough to understand it. Check out the Telegraph article at the following link and let me know what you think!
“Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope”
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