On Ears And Correctness

There's an old saying that goes "When the map and the terrain disagree, the terrain is correct." This lighthearted advice should be self-evident, but we tend to put a lot of trust into a neatly printed color map. There is a part of our brains that insists that there must be something wrong with our surroundings, or that we simply haven't properly oriented ourselves. Is there a "composition map" we put too much faith into?

When writing music, we call upon all the theoretical knowledge we have to help us capture our thoughts. We constantly compare ourselves to the great composers past and present, and see our endeavors in comparison to theirs. We keep in our minds a vast storehouse of theoretical rules of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. We know when we are "following the rules," just as we know when we break them. Even though most of us have little problem in breaking with the traditions of past musical practices, we can still establish for ourselves preferences in our writing habits that we unconsciously treat as unbreakable rules.

We also create new rules for ourselves on a very conscious level. Consider the notion of serial music and the 12-tone system as championed by the Second Viennese School. The 12-tone system was a reaction to a perceived problem in finding new function in harmony. The rules in their strictest form made it excedingly easy to compose a piece of music that had no obvious tonal center, while retaining enough structure to hold the music together as a cohesive whole. It was only one set of rules out of an infinite number of possibilities, yet many people latched onto it as a way to find new avenues of expression for themselves. Even today, more than 85 years after Schoenberg first described the system, it is still being used as the basis for some composers' works, as well as taught in university level classes.

In what may be seen as a great irony, the freedom that the 12-tone technique was meant to bring gave us one of the most restrictive set of rules of composition in several hundred years. Not that it necessarily has to be restrictive, but composer after composer have used it to tie their own hands. I mean to be in no way disparaging of Schoenberg or his idea, but I have to wonder why it has been used so extensively for so long when it represented only a very tiny slice of the space of new possible rule sets.

Obviously all of this is a great oversimplification. Many composers have used original variations of the idea, or borrowed from it only what was needed at a given moment. Some have used the basic rule set, but have had no problem straying from it whenever it suits them. Sticking to this or any other set of rules, or breaking and switching rules both are valid ways of furthering ones art. But this brings us back to my original point.

"When the map and the terrain disagree, the terrain is correct."

Let us look at this thought again, imagining a given musical rule set as our map and our ears as the terrain. Being in the realm of the auditory, it should be quite obvious that the ear should be our ultimate arbitrator in all things musical. As Duke Ellington once said, "If it sounds good, it is good." Or as I like to think of it, "When the rule and the ear disagree, the ear is correct." As with the original version of this saying, it should be self-evident. But is it?

We are first taught that parallel-fifths are undesirable. Later we learn that it's perfectly fine to break that rule as long as we know we are breaking it. Still later, we may be pressured into purposefully breaking the rule, when it no longer should have any sway on our decisions. We are put into a position of focusing on every parallel-fifth we write or avoid in the context of correct and incorrect. We know that there is nothing at all wrong with writing one, but we consider the right and wrong of it all the time, and have great difficulty in letting go of it, whether we acknowledge it or not.

There is no right or wrong in the music we create. Still more obvious advice, but knowing it and having it become the core of our artistic selves are two different things. When we can write a 12-tone piece and end it in a simple cadence to D-major with complete confidence, and without asking ourselves permission first, we will have given ourselves freedom from from the past without giving up its lessons.