Scott Aniol July 17th, 2008

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The term development, in music, can be understood in two ways:

It can refer to the central section in a particular type of form called sonata form. In this case the development follows the exposition of themes and expands them; this expansion leads to the recapitulation of the themes, which typically ends the first movement of the sonata.

But development can also be understood more generally, simply as progression or expansion within a single piece of music, and it’s this sense that I’m concerned about. Let’s say you’re a composer, and you have a theme, a melody; now what do you do with it? Let’s say you assign a piano to play through the theme. Is your song done? Well, it could be; but if you want to write a serious song, an art song, then your piece has just begun. You’ve stated your theme, but now you have to develop it. How do you go about that? There are lots of options.

1. You can compress it or divide it;
2. You can regroup it into different phrases;
3. You can introduce harmonic or dynamic alterations;
4. You can use articulations and expressions;
5. You can vary the tone color or throw in some registral contrast.

All of these changes are directed by a sense of artistic creativity which gives the piece life. You see, if all you have is a melody (even if it’s a nice melody) it’s not really art music yet. That doesn’t mean it’s bad (for goodness sake let’s save moral distinctions for later!); it might be a lullaby or a children’s song or a folk song or even a hymn – but it’s not art music because art music goes somewhere; it has a goal and it has direction. Art music takes us on a journey, enabled by these techniques of development. You know, any culture you name (African, Far Eastern, Native American) has its stash of melodies. That’s nothing new. But only the West has adopted this post-Renaissance idea that melodies can be put in a broad, extra-melodic framework which heightens the communicative ability of the piece. Only the West can boast a tradition of development – of departure and return. And this is why the music of the West is so powerful – because when a skilled composer takes us on a journey, we can catch a glimpse of his metaphysical dream.

My thesis has three parts:

1. First, that it is this sense of development which characterizes the musical tradition of the West;
2. Second, that evangelicalism has largely rejected this rich tradition of development;
3. Third, that in order to regain the ability to create meaningful music which can hold its ground both as art and as worship, we must regain an awareness of development.

But to explain how development has shaped our musical landscape we need a brief overview of musical history with an emphasis on the ways development was achieved; and we begin with the composer who more than any other should be our champion. Bach was a musical and personal conservative; he was an orthodox Protestant Christian; he was the greatest organist and composer of his day; and, to put it simply, he was the single most influential person in bringing Baroque music to its peak — so that when Bach died in 1750 the era ended.

Bach is a kind of anomaly: most composers are remembered for their progressiveness and striving to break the musical mold, but Bach was content to remain in his own time and work with those forms which already existed – the concerto, the cantata, the suite, the prelude, and most notably the fugue which he brought to virtual perfection.

Bach’s music is contrapuntal, which means “note against note” or “melody against melody.” Counterpoint indicates the simultaneous progression of two or more independent melodic lines. This music is particularly interesting from the standpoint of development because the themes of the Baroque rarely come to a complete standstill until the end of the piece; they always find a way to keep going, fueled by the organic variety of harmonies between voices. Contrapuntal music develops on both a horizontal and a vertical level:

1. Horizontal, because after all we’re dealing with elongated melodic lines, which act as a generating force; they propel the music forward and give it motion;
2. Vertical, because the intervals between voices constantly change size – and these intervals have to follow specific rules and therefore act as a curbing or controlling force.

By the time of Bach’s death, his music was hopelessly out of date. Among the new stars on the horizon was Bach’s son C. P. E., who along with Haydn was responsible for the emergence of a new, refined musical structure called sonata form. The sonata stressed development as a particular, central section whose goal was to struggle through various keys till returning to tonic for the recapitulation. While the counterpoint of the Baroque was concerned with keeping themes going for the duration of the piece while undergoing subtle alterations, the sonata set up a proscribed formula in which melodies were exposed from beginning to end and then expanded in a clearly distinguishable development, which became the trademark of the Classical era (dominated by Mozart). This structure allowed for creative freedom within the restraints of balance and symmetry.

Then we come to Beethoven, the greatest artist of all, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beethoven is in some ways the antithesis to Bach; because while Bach was a modest conservative, Beethoven has been called the truest of democrats – a progressive who created faster than he destroyed. Beethoven is notorious for his unprecedented willingness to break musical rules when he felt that emotion merited it, and his individualistic aesthetic prompted Weaver to label Beethoven’s music “the indulgence of egocentric sensibility.” But he is of the most interest to us in this discussion not because of his unchecked passion in music but because the very reason for his genius is the way he treats development. In fact if you were to take development out of Beethoven you would be left with virtually nothing – his melodies are strikingly unremarkable. What Beethoven manages to do better than any composer before him (or even after him) is to transform simple tunes into epic journeys filled with passion and emotion, and he does it through intense, hair-rending development. Beethoven’s footing along his musical adventures is so sure, in spite of his repudiation of tradition and rules, that the listener feels the music could not possibly have been written otherwise. Bernstein called this quality - this feeling that the Beethoven’s music had existed for eternity, hidden somewhere in the universe until finally realized by the artist - Beethoven’s “inevitability.”

Beethoven changed everything. His rejection of the precise rules of sonata form became the model for future composers, and by the 1830s and 40s the Romantic movement was in full swing. No longer were composers content to perfect forms (like Bach); they felt obligated to expand them. Music had become a contest of progression – a game to see which composer could outdo the others in depth of expression and harmonic language. Development shifted from a rigid structural element to a matter of tone color, harmony and timbre. Romanticism became the outlet for extremes – the grandiose and the magnificent, the bizarre, the bombastic, the pathetic. And through this pursuit of increasingly greater levels of intensity and emotion, the sense of key which we call tonality began to disintegrate.

We skip to 1865 - the end of the Romantic period and the spot where tonality was stretched to its breaking point; and we can get an accurate sense of this stretch from the first bars of Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde.” It’s as if Wagner is modulating from key from key in desperate search of harmonic satisfaction and not finding it anywhere. The twelve tones of the keyboard are used nearly equally; and, with Wagner, tonality could not be fragmented any further.

It couldn’t be fragmented further – but, of course, someone tried to. It was Arnold Schoenberg, a young genius who began as a Romantic in the tradition of Wagner but found it impossible to go any further without breaking the tonal system entirely.

So he did.

The twentieth century saw not only the crippling of tonality in music but also the diffusion of Western composers. Tonality had functioned as a central reference - a kind of musical North Star which had steered European composers since the Renaissance. Even during the period of fierce nationalism in the late 19th century, when composers from different European nation-states were expected to produce music that sounded Russian or Bohemian or Scandinavian, they all worked within the framework of tonality.

Tonality was the common denominator of the West.

It is instructive to note the parallel between the shattering of tonality, the end of the Romantic movement, and World War I. These three events are closely related. With World War I the artists of the West finally understood the true ramifications of the Romantic experiment – the final culmination of nationalism and unchecked emotion. And when tonality was stretched to its maximum by Wagner and then broken by Schoenberg, composers lost not only a proscribed structure within which to develop their art but also a bond between themselves. Generally we could say that they split into two schools:

1. The tonalists, who insisted that tonality could be continued;
2. The atonalists, led by Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern.

Now remember, this discussion is about development in music, not necessarily tonality; but it’s interesting that when Schoenberg ditched tonality he also tried to get rid of development. His idea was to have free atonality, where the twelve tones could interact without restrictions of any kind; and for awhile he wrote pieces like this. But it didn’t work. Schoenberg realized that he needed some sort of form or structure to encase his twelve-tone system.

Now, there’s a big controversy over whether music can exist without tonality. Obviously Schoenberg thought it could. Many musical conservatives thought otherwise. But what nobody disagreed upon was whether meaningful music – art music – can exist without development. It can’t; Schoenberg tried and failed by his own admission. He understood the need to create a form for his atonal system, and in the end he constructed one derived from math. This should come as no surprise: World War I had shaken men’s faith in every human convention because they felt that these conventions had betrayed them; and in a kind of despair they acknowledged numbers as the only thing they could trust. Schoenberg’s form became known as serialism, which continues to this day (Stockhausen, Messiaen, Crumb, other “number nerds”).

Meanwhile other composers, the tonalists, were attempting to rescue tonality. This was not as easy as it sounds. They had to reject Schoenberg, because Schoenberg was atonal; but Schoenberg was simply an effect or a result of Wagner. And Wagner himself was only a result of the progressive spirit of the Romantic movement; in fact the whole catastrophe of Wagner and Schoenberg can be traced all the way back to Beethoven. So these early twentieth century composers who wanted to preserve tonality had to do so while rejecting a hundred years of musical tradition. They had to construct a completely new way of approaching tones.’

And they did. And it’s this new approach that intrigues me. I’d like to read a description now of a work of art – visual art – which I think will help describe the new way in which composers began to look at tonality.

“Josef Albers discovered his signature motif in 1950, when he was sixty-two years old. Over the next twenty-five years he methodically produced more than one thousand works in the Homage to the Square series, which he called ‘platters for color.’ Rather than mixing paint, he used pigments directly from the tube. In these works Albers explored an illusion whereby the central square, lying between the inner and outer squares, would subtly take on the hue of its neighbors. He termed this the ‘interaction of color.’ This effect may not be evident when the work is seen in reproduction, but most important to Albers — the mood of the work should be evident.”

I think Alber’s technique in painting mirrors the methods by which the tonalists revived tonality. They approached music as a combination of adjacent tones which can be combined to produce different hues, different colors, different sonorities. It was the kind of approach that a thoughtful native might take when experimenting with a keyboard for the first time. He might play one note and listen to it. Then play the note above it with it and listen. Then the next note up. Then all three at once. Pretty soon he is trying all sorts of combinations and paying attention to how the juxtapositions of different tones affect the mood of the sonority.

1. Combinations with C as root;
2. Chords made of thirds (skipping every other);
3. Chords made of fourths (skipping two at a time);
4. Chords made of fifths (skipping three at a time);
5. Chords with added tones (especially minor);
6. Chords made of constant intervallic combinations (mystic chords and whole tone scales);
7. Experimentation with modes.

This type of approach allowed tonal music to develop in a direction that was cleaner and of sparser texture than the chord-heavy Wagnerian chromaticism. The tonalists, however, were never as unified as the atonalists. Instead they were broken into several schools:

1. The Impressionists (Satie, Debussy, Ravel), who were a French school specifically reacting against the excesses of Wagner and German Romanticism;
2. The Neoclassicists (Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich), who returned to the form and balance of the Classical era and combined the counterpoint of the Baroque with twentieth century techniques;
3. The Third Stream movement (Gunther Schuller), a short-lived attempt to combine classical forms with jazz;
4. The Minimalists (Glass, Reich, Adams), who use repeating harmonic structure out of Far Eastern tradition. A spin-off group is the “Holy Minimalists” – Tavener, Part, Goreki).
5. These movements were all affected (with the possible exception of Impressionism) by the advent of electronic music.

So there’s three hundred years of development music in a nutshell, and the question now is, Where does the music of evangelicalism come in? The answer is that it doesn’t. Though evangelicals themselves might think otherwise and claim that they hail from the tradition of art music (after all, they might object, haven’t we done such a good job of combining hymns with famous classical tunes?), in reality the music of evangelicalism parallels the progression of popular music more than any serious trend of art music.

I mentioned the Third Stream movement, which attempted to combine classical forms with jazz. It didn’t end up working, and the movement fizzled, ultimately because jazz is simply to loose for the rigidity of a concert hall. Jazz, being largely improvisatory, lacks development; and though it requires some skill to perform, it cannot exist as art music. But of course jazz itself was eclipsed halfway through the century by the untimely birth of rock and the subsequent sad story of popular music in the West. I don’t have much to say about that, except that, for better or worse, popular music has rejected form completely. What popular music does is not only to erase musical development but to make such development impossible. Development requires time, and the value of popular music is tied integrally to a reckless hurry, driven by a tempo which is incapable of responding to the natural hierarchy of a musical line. It cannot pause, for it is unable to process time. Weaver says, “What it indicates spiritually is a restlessness, a desire to get on, to realize without going through the aesthetic ritual. Forward to the climax, it seems to say; let us dispense with the labor of earning effects”.

What is amusing in all this is that art music, to a large degree, has rejected tonality yet in every instance has retained development and form; while popular music, of which the music of evangelicalism is a wimpy hybrid, has retained tonality but rejected development and form. They are both mutants. But given the option, wouldn’t you much rather listen to music which actually means something? Evangelical music, while less obscenely percussive than its secular counterparts, can only mimic the formless sentimentality of love songs or echo jingly tunes from the fifties. The music of evangelicalism, far from belonging to the hard-fought tradition of art music, takes its cues freely from the theater and the circus.

My claim is that the music of evangelicalism is not art music because it has rejected basis elements of thoughtful development. I have reasons:

1. It has no regard for mode, particularly minor mode, which evangelicals simply don’t know how to use. On the rare occasions that minor mode does show up, its purpose is most likely one of mere decoration: it might be used for one variation out of several (never the last variation), or for a verse followed by a refrain in major mode. It is unthinkable for a evangelical to begin and end a piece in minor mode; the excuse is often offered that Christians should be filled with the joy of the Lord; it has not occurred to evangelicals that the joy of the Lord may include at times great sorrow, or that minor chords can symbolize anything other than death.
2. It has no regard for key. Evnagelcial arrangements and compositions tend to reel drunkenly from key to key without any regard for structural considerations. It is done in a careless manner which would be unthinkable in either the classical or neoclassical traditions. Pieces rarely begin and end in the same key, and little attention is given to the unique qualities each key provides, both aesthetically (i.e. the consideration that D flat major in a low register on piano is the purest of all keys) and practically (i.e. that the best keys for choral singing are F sharp major, C sharp major, and B major - far from the overused F, C, and G). It is an especially favorite technique in choral anthems, after a bombastic, screeching refrain, to modulate up a half-step or whole step and sing the whole refrain again. Don’t get me wrong: modulation is fine (although half-step and whole-step modulations are clichéd and sound cheesy); but in art music modulation should signify the end of one section and the beginning of another (and most often the end of one theme and the commencement of the next. This leads us to the next quibble).
3. It has no regard for form. Evangelicalism has rejected not only sonata form and all its variants as means of creative expression; it has rejected even the most basic notion of secondary themes. The only form at all in evangelical music today, aside from the endless verse/refrain, is the theme and variation, which is generally mutilated beyond recognition by carelessness. You want variations? Listen to the Goldberg, first. Then get your hands on some Beethoven. Then check out Brahms on a theme by Haydn, Britten on a theme by Purcell, and of course Elgar on a theme by himself although some of us think it’s really a theme by Mozart. These pieces have an endgame other than ponderous self-perpetuation. They go somewhere; they develop; and when the final variation is over the audience feels a sense of completion and satisfaction. Evangelicals, in their enthusiasm to use variations as an opportunity to show off technique, miss the very point of technique.
4. Finally, the music of evangelicalism is boring. I work at a grocery store in a little office with a speaker right above my head, and it’s always blaring pop music of some sort. And while that music is rarely if ever compatible with the Christian affections, at least once in a while something interesting happens – harmonically or rhythmically or whatever – some progression with a glimmer of development which would actually have potential in the hands of a real composer. But I never get even this from evangelicalism’s music, only the dreary rehashing of the same flourishes and formulas from last week. The only thing that can be said in evangelicals’ defense on this count is that their original tunes often fit very nicely with their original lyrics.

So at last we have to ask, what can we do about it all? What options do we have for improvement? Arrangements and compositions which are intended for use as worship should hold their ground as art music. Again, this means that they will develop; and while Christian composers should preserve the music of the past, they must be able to work within the language of the present culture. I mentioned a while ago that both atonality with development and tonality without development are mutants. If Christian music is to continue, it cannot do so through either of them. But there’s a third option – the option kept open to us by the tonalists of the early twentieth century. Enough musical language has been preserved for serious composers to manage; and while no doubt we would prefer to write music like Bach, we must understand that music is closely tied to culture, and culture has changed over the last three hundred years. Granted, we dislike the change; we disapprove of the change; but we’re stuck with it. We must work with what we have, however small the palette.

Of particular interest to the modern composer are the works of Rachmaninoff, Hindemith, Britten, Vaughn-Williams, Bernstein, and more recently Arvo Part, John Tavener, Henri Goreki, and Morton Laurisden.

Finally, I suggest two courses of action for the musical layman:

1. Listen to art music. There is no better way to solidify your views on music than to listen to the real thing.
2. Learn an instrument. Not too many generations ago, everyone played an instrument; if you wanted to hear music, you just got the family together and performed it. Today, you push a button. My piano teacher at St Thomas and I were discussing the impact of recorded music on musical proficiency in America. My teacher is, ironically, a diehard liberal, but what she told me in that conversation was conservative enough to have come straight out of Weaver. She said, “What people don’t realize is that there is a cost to technology – more than just the surface price of the gadgets they buy. It’s costing them community.”

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