|
Of course, millions of words have been written
and spoken over the centuries, even millennia, about the relationship of
art and science. Let me just enumerate a few examples. We all know, I’m
sure, about the various theories which equate, for instance, music and
mathematics via the common bridge of acoustics; or the long-held belief
that music is but a branch of mathematics; or for that matter the consistent
pairing of the terms “science” and “art” from Greek
antiquity on to the
present day; or the ancient theories, still widely held, that music is
but an audible exteriorization of the vibrations of life forces
themselves—“vibrations of the cosmos” and “the
music of the spheres” are the catch
phrases of two of these notions; or again, the countless examples in the
music literature of various mathematical or numerological approaches to
the art of musical composition, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Alban Berg,
John Cage, and Milton Babbitt. Or the various concepts of constructivism
in music, especially that of symmetrical constructions observable in the
works of a number of early twentieth-century composers like Schoenberg,
Scriabin, Bartök, and Charles Ives; and in our own time the application,
for example, of stochastic principles and those of information theory in,
let us say, the works of composers like Yannis Xenakis, who is also a sometime
mathematician and architect. Or the now-prevalent reality of computer-generated
music where, obviously, twentieth-century scientific and technological
advances play a central role in the very creation and reproduction of music.
The list could go on with other lesser and greater instances of close ties
between music and science.
Often enough such ideas were regarded, at least by their authors if not by the rest of the artistic community, as major breakthroughs, as innovations that purported to be panaceas which would solve in some objectifiable way problems which had previously defied resolution. One thinks of the highly touted Schillinger system of composition and compositional analysis some decades ago; of the theories of the technologically oriented futurist movement in Italy and Switzerland around the time of World War I; or, I suppose, even the concept of Schoenberg’s “method of composing with twelve tones which are only related to each other”—insofar as this concept was understood (but I think more often misunderstood) as a system, a mathematical system at that. No, there hasn’t been exactly a shortage of attempts to systematize music, to formularize it, to quantify it, to absolutize it, to objectify and rationalize it, almost always out of an urge to emulate science, to make out of the “science of music,” as so many music theoreticians of the Renaissance loved to call it, a more exact and measurable science. And yet in nearly four thousand years of contemplation of the phenomenon we call music, from Ptolemy and Plato to Leonard Meyer and Schenker to this very day, no universally accepted or even universally understood definition of music, of its essence, of its aesthetics has been realized.
Gunther Schuller
|