I saw an interesting quote at reddit,
"Functional programming is in Computer Science like modern classical music, i.e. something esoteric where the success criteria are weirdness and unpopularity. FP becomes an escapism from applications." Bjarne Däcker
that will give me an opportunity to relate functional programming to classical music (well, not really) which my wife will probably find interesting (well, not really).
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Cute quote, but it's quite wrong. Modern classical music is based on some very seductive ideas taken to an extreme, but there the similarity ends, because the idea of modern classical music has been proved to be horribly wrong and very dangerous - if applied to a less harmless subject.
The idea was this: classical composers liked to think about what they were doing, and they developed elaborate theories about what made music sound good. These theories were not as arbitrary as one may think, for a large part they succeeded in a fairly rigorous capture of things that felt "out of place" in their kind of music. This reached a peak at the time of Mozart (called the classicistic period in cm history), and Mozart apparently thought that his kind of music was objectively the best, quite scientific, and that at most minor changes would be made from where he was.
But as tastes changed, practice moved further and further away from the classical ideal. Unfortunately, and quite accidentally, at the same time a nasty form of pseudo-rationalism arose, which said that the progress of history was ruled by deterministic laws (which could be uncovered by pseudo-scientific oracle-scientists. Think Marx). Now that was intuitively appealing to classical composers, because they could see that more and more of the classical rules were broken. Many composers were tempted into futurism, that is, trying to beat the crowd and make today the music that would be popular tomorrow. I think perhaps Hector Berlioz was the first to apply this idea successfully in classical music, he saw himself as the heir to Beethoven, and strove to exaggregate the traits in Beethoven that he thought were most progressive. However, he still had an audience to entertain, so there were limits to how much he could stretch it, and that is why his music is very much enjoyable today as well.
Later in the eighteenth century, though, audiences also caught the historical determinism bug, and they would accept music increasingly alien to what their ears had learned to make sense of. Wagner and the "impressionists" Debussy and Ravel went quite far with this, but they managed to remain popular by being genuinely fashionable (as opposed to futuristic) in orchestration techniques. The latter two also constructed a theory about themselves in the "progress of history"-framework, explaining how they were the musical parallels to impressionist painters.
But with futurism you had two choices: go a little into what you thought would be the "future", and remain enjoyable to your audience, and popular (if you can get the public to accept that your music is the music of the next decade) _or_ go completely prophetic, and make the music that you boldly proclaim to be the music of the next century. Then you have ditched your audience completely in favour of your peers, the other composers, and the critics (who were heavily into the Progress of History Kool-Aid). There were money to be made there as well, in the form of university positions, and catering to the most extremely fashion-conscious - who were also often the most extremely rich.
The first who tried the second path were Arnold Schönberg and his disciples. They had the attitude that all the existing had to be torn down, and a new glorious world built on top of it, led by prophet-kings such as themselves. That this was exactly paralelled in politics by communism and fascism (disciples of the Progress of History school on left and right sides of politics respectively) they apparently didn't notice.
Moderate futurism, trying to be at the forefront of wherever we're heading to, often works, despite being based on the flawed theory of historical destiny. That is because whether your ideas are the future or not, if you convince enough people that it is, at least it becomes a future. For radical futurism, that is not the case. Communism and fascism both convinced millions of people that they were the future, more than any artistical trend could ever hope to, and yet it was not enough to turn their prophecies into reality.
But paradoxically that was what created the small niche which allowed modern classical music to survive in a way. Because communism and fascism both loathed modern classical. The modernists explained this with their boldness, independence, and uncompromising attitude, but didn't they all just react against competing, incompatible historical-destiny doctrines? Anyway, this earned radical futurism in the arts a form of protection in most democratic states, because when all the bad guys hate you, you got to be doing something right, right? So modernistic classical music and other modernistic art forms were firmly entrenched in the educational system. They still are, because they now have a card they can invoke against any criticism: since totalitarians considered modernistic art worthless and subversive, anyone else who does so is possibly opressive and wicked. The futures that they predicted look completely anachronistical today, it's obvious to everyone else that they didn't come to pass, and won't in the future, either. Still, music students are taught the "importance" of obscure composers' experiments with computer generated sinus tones and magnetic tapes in the fifties. They've forked history, and live in their own world, completely isolated from what's actually happening in 99% of all music. Performing music studies are so demanding in themselves that students don't have the time nor inclination to question the basic premises of their institutions.
One characteristic of radical futurism that somehow is kept alive is that it does not change very much. There is no living culture to build upon, so even when they believe they are at their most radical, they thread the same paths again and again ("electronically modified" gongs or gongs submerged into water are some such cliches in radical futuristic music. You can also find radical futuristic chairs from the thirties, welded together from metal pipes, that look practically identical to futuristic designer chairs made today, and probably every decade in between). I believe modernistic classical music is especially uncreative. In modernistic theatre and sculpture, there are at least some that attempt to reach the increasibly uninterested audiences through goatse-like exhibitionism, but those have no parallels in modern classical music, as far as I know. (Except in opera, but those are the results of theatre-educated instructors, who put up classical operas in gross-futuristic scenographic style).
I don't count on radical futurism to go away anytime soon in the arts, even though it has disappeared completely from politics. For that it is too firmly entrenched in music education. Perhaps if Benestad read up on some Popper, but don't count on it.
Posted by vintermann at January 15, 2007 11:53 AM