Atonal music is written in the book. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

So, what is atonal music?

First of all, as the book says, almost all the music we hear is tonal, whether it is classical music, national music, rock, pop, jazz, Latin, all of them are tonal.

Why?

Because all music, there is a key.

For example, we often say that Chinese music has a key called "pentatonic mode", and the gong Shang Jiao Zhengyu is used, while the Japanese benzene uses the "Du Jie mode", and many Christian church music uses the "Middle Ages" mode, while Western classical music, our pop music, adopts the "major and minor keys", and jazz also has jazz keys. For example, "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do" is a key and "C major is natural".

The formation of the key is a big issue. It seems that people are born with a preference for "tonality", which embodies the aesthetic tendency of the music of a region and an era, which is not created out of thin air, experimented with precise science, and born according to some detailed theory, it is only a summary of experience at first.

The source of the key is, first of all, "tone". Sound is produced by the vibration of an object. When a sound appears alone, generally speaking, there will be no "harmony or not" or "harsh or not", and when multiple different sounds appear, people begin to have a judgment, these two sounds together, is it good? And discord? When people are singing, or humming at will, the first note comes out, and naturally there will be a second, a third, and a fourth...... When some notes are sung, people will judge, "Are the notes I just sang?"

The more times they sing, the more people who sing, and after the summary of experience, people will choose some sounds and keys that are better together in a row, and perhaps this is how they were born. Maybe? Why maybe? Because, no one knows how he was born, and the specific process can no longer be verified. After all, music predates writing.

A key is a sequence of tones that are arranged in high and low order.

And now, it is the Western "major and minor keys" that dominate the main venue of music, which is the foundation of the Western music system. Speaking of this, it is necessary to mention the discipline system.

In the beginning, the perception of sound was different in different regions. For example, how high are the three sounds of "do, re, mi"? How should it be? Each region has its own judgment about "pitch". The essence of sound is the vibration of objects, and after this was discovered, people began to wonder, what kind of vibration frequency should the sound "do" be? 440 beats per second? 446 beats per second? 432 beats per second? Each region has its own different interpretations, and thus different laws have arisen.

Therefore, for a long period of time, the law of five degrees of symbiosis, the law of purity, and the law of three-point profit and loss ...... and so on, each dominating various regions of the world.

Until, a cow man appeared.

This is a member of the royal family of the Ming Dynasty, the great musician, scientist, mathematician Zhu Zaiyu, who is known as the "Chinese Renaissance sage" in 1548 A.D. for the first time systematically and scientifically proposed the law of twelve equals. Although the idea of the "law of twelve equals" was proposed as early as ancient Greece, that person did not make a detailed calculation, and only mentioned a concept and did not put it away. Zhu Zaiyu did it, he calculated the vibration frequency of each note in detail and put it into practice.

However, it is a pity and irony that musicians in China have a low status for a long time, as a prince, he devoted himself to music, mathematics, astronomy, and was even regarded as a deviant. The legal system used in ancient China is also the twelve laws, but it is not "average", but the twelve laws calculated by the three-point profit and loss method, which is the law stipulated in the books of the sages and handed down since the time of Confucius. There is an old Chinese saying that "the laws of the ancestors cannot be changed", and the laws of the ancestors cannot be changed. Therefore, the law of twelve equals did not flourish in the land of China, and it drifted across the ocean to the far west.

One day in the 18th century, a German church organist named Johann Sebastian Bach stumbled upon a book containing the "Twelve Equal Temperaments", and he was amazed when he read it! After careful consideration, he believes that the 12 equal laws are more scientific than the previous laws of five degrees of symbiosis and pure law!

He immediately set about renovating his piano, and according to the rules in the book, he made a piano according to the standard of "twelve equal laws". (To be precise, it wasn't called a piano at that time, it should have been called a harpsichord, or a clavichord.) ）

This new system of law made him like it more and more. In 1722, he was so pleased with the new rhythm that he immediately wrote a collection of music for this new rhythm, which he called "Piano Pieces for the Twelve Equal Temperaments".

Perhaps, you are not a person who knows music in particular, otherwise you would have let out an exclamation!

"Twelve Equal Temperament Piano Pieces", in Western music, is called the "Old Testament of music", which you may not understand, then I will change the analogy, that is the "Analects" of music! Bach's position in music is what Confucius is to Confucianism!

As a result, the law of twelve equals began to be popularized, and it blossomed everywhere in distant Europe, from Mozart to Haydn, from Beethoven to Schubert, Chopin and Liszt...... To this day, almost all musical instruments use the twelve equal temperament! But in the eyes of most people, the law of twelve equals comes from the West, and that is the Western law! From the "father of music" named Bach, the man who is called "God" in the eyes of musicians.

Few people know that the Law of Twelve Equals actually came from China, from a "rebellious" prince named Zhu Zaiyu.

When we open the textbooks of junior high school and primary school students, Xu Xiake, Li Shizhen, Xu Guangqi and the like of the Ming Dynasty come into view, have you ever seen Zhu Zaiyu's name? This man, who has influenced music all over the world for more than 300 years, is not known in books, and the famous British scholar Dr. Joseph Needham sighed: "This is really an incredible irony." ”

And the size system actually fits the law of twelve equals abnormally! The two joined forces, swept Europe, and then swept the whole world.

However, as time went on, generations of composers worked hard to explore all the possibilities of the major and minor key system, and gradually, some of them began to feel dissatisfied.

Why?

Because, it's so harmonious, it's so good.

We must be strange today, harmony is also wrong? Is it a sin to sound good? Chinese have always advocated harmony, such as earthlings have always liked to look good.

That's where the pull-out begins.

It has something to do with the thinking of that era.

We always feel that music should be beautiful. But we seldom think about the question, what is beauty?

What is beauty, this is another big question.

Since the ancient Greek period, Pythagoras and Plato began to discuss what beauty is, and similarly, in the East, there is a person named "Lao Tzu" who is also talking about beauty. However, there is still no conclusive conclusion on what beauty is.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant first pioneered the discussion of "what is beauty" into "what is aesthetics", and aesthetics began to embark on a new journey.

Kant first proposed in the Critique of Judgment that "aesthetics is an intuition". This leads aesthetics onto a broad road, from objective aesthetics, that is, discussing what beauty is and the true meaning of beauty, to subjective aesthetics, focusing on aesthetics. Aesthetics is a process of judgment, and people will have a sense of beauty only when they have a judgment. Until now, it takes courage to talk about "objective aesthetics", because it has been recognized in the aesthetic community that beauty cannot be objective, and discussing objective beauty is a dead end. Kant pointed out that judgment precedes feeling, that is, we have already judged whether it is beautiful or not when we do not know what "objective beauty" is, and then we can discuss beauty after we have judged, which is probably a very big logical loophole. Kant has a detailed argument in the book, which has become a public opinion, not my family opinion, and interested friends can go and see it.

Kant said that aesthetics is an activity that is "super-utilitarian", "purposeless", "non-conceptual", and "subjectively universal". Coupled with the previous ones, the aesthetic is an intuition. We can probably know what aesthetics Kant is talking about.

So, you must ask, isn't it about music? How did you get to Kant?

Because obviously, music is about beauty, which is actually a judgment and an end. You listen to music, you want to have the experience of "beauty", this is a purpose, if you listen to music with the purpose of "beauty", then you are not "aesthetic" in the process of listening to music. This has influenced a lot of musicians.

Therefore, I often say that if you want to aesthetic an art, such as painting, music, film, literature, you must first remember that there is no purpose, that is, you cannot first expect yourself to get "beauty", an experience, and a feeling from it, so that you can "aesthetically"; Secondly, there are some "anti-online texts" things, saying that the most important thing in online texts is the "sense of substitution", but according to Kant's theory, the sense of substitution is undesirable in aesthetics, because aesthetics is "super utilitarian" and "purposeless", and aesthetics must be a spectator to make subjective judgments (Kant has a very tongue twister description of this, "purpose without specific purpose" and "purposeless form of purpose"), that is, aesthetics is an objective subjectivity.

Why should music be beautiful? Why should music be harmonious? Why should music be good?

People have always taken this for granted, but has anyone delved into the question: Why?

Can we really make so-called "objective judgments" about "beauty", "harmony", and "goodness"? Kant said, no. So, we can only judge subjectively, but since it is a subjective thing, is the subjective "beauty" still beautiful? Is the subjective "good-sounding" still good-sounding?

This point has stirred the hearts of those musicians who are faintly restless in their hearts. Liszt, as a great musician of his time, was the first to stand up. At this time, he was already a veteran of European music, a grandmaster-level figure, and with a wave of his hand, he wrote several very "strange" works, called "Piano Sketches". In this work, the elements of disharmony are very strong, and the original Western tonal colors have become blurred.

Liszt's later works reached the ears of a student at the French Conservatory. The student also heard many exotic music, such as the Russian composer Mussorgsky, as well as unknown Middle Eastern music. It was as if he had suddenly opened his mind, and a very complete system had been formed in his mind.

The student's name was Archer-Claude Debussy.

Debussy's music, though not complete, is revolutionary enough to break the traditional music system! He slowly untied the shackles of the traditional system of major and minor tonality, and the single color became complex and hazy, and a new musical genre appeared on the stage. The major and minor key system has been severely impacted!

It was also from this that music began to have two paths...... Either they stubbornly grasp the harmonious traditional major and minor key system, and occasionally want to resist and embrace some discordant elements, or they have been attacking the traditional major and minor key system to the end and desperately breaking all the shackles.

Since Debussy, every composer has jumped out and made a powerful attack on the traditional major and minor key systems, strong or weak.

Later, Schoenberg, as mentioned in this book, appeared. The emergence of Schoenberg officially opened the way to completely break away from the traditional system. The system in music is broken and reconstructed.

If Bach is the founder of tonal color, Beethoven is the promoter of tonal color, Debussy hazy tonal color, and Schoenberg officially discarded tonal color.

Since then, it has been out of control.

Music is divided into two schools, one that still uses traditional musical techniques and adheres to the ideas of "harmony" and so-called "beauty", and the other that sets out to break down and pioneer, this school of music, which is called "avant-garde" music or "modernist" music.

However, the traditionalism has not changed much, and the modernism has become very frightening.

First of all, modernist composers are increasingly showing a tendency: one person, one school. That is to say, each composer has established his own music system, no longer using the traditional system, nor using the system created by others, but the system they created has a different degree of perfection.

Secondly, in the modernist school, it is divided into two factions, one faction advocates logic and still has certain reservations about traditional music, what does it retain? The tone is preserved, the musical tone is retained, the note specified by the twelve equal laws is retained, and the instrument is still used; Another school, known as accidental music, believes that all sounds can be used as material for music.

The latter, the most famous and outstanding representative of accidental music, is the American musician John Cage. He is best known for his work "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds": the pianist walks up to the stage, bows to the audience, and then sits in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds.

Yes, sit still, and don't play a single note.

So, what do the audience listen to? Listen to everything, listen to everything he can hear.

John Cage also has a very famous work, he connected the chess board under the line, recorded the sound of the chess on the board into the computer, and then he invited Marcel Duchamp, who is also a pioneering artist, to play chess, and the sound of the two chess is music.

This concept can be said to be 100% unconventional.

Marcel Duchamp was also a man of God, he was called the "patron saint of modern art", and he had two famous works, one called "The Fountain": at an exhibition of paintings from all over the world, the masters gathered, and he sent his artwork - a male urinal bought in a store.

In the second famous work, he painted an identical Mona Lisa according to da Vinci's famous work, and then used a pencil to draw a few mustaches on Mona Lisa's face, and named it "Her Ass is Hot and Baking".

At this point, you may have a certain understanding of the history of music.

I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for having come this far with this boring article.

Finally, although I am also involved in music, I still have one thing to say about the works of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp: "I really don't understand." ”