- Nahre how's it going? - Hey LA. - I got a question for you, what is your
definition of music? Languages evolve over time. If I wrote this message
and mailed it to the 1960s, it will be dismissed
as nonsense. Like any language, what
is considered music is also constantly changing. When The Ramones released
their debut album in 1976, parents hated it and radio
stations wouldn't play it. But three decades later, their
music was selling Diet Pepsi. There have always been
musicians and composers that push the edges
of what we call music. - In the early 20th
century some composers began to reject conventional
ideas of harmony and tonality. And no composer did this more
boldly than Arnold Schoenberg who wrote music that
was so against the times that audiences would often
boo, laugh and heckle at his performances. Imagine it's the 1920s, your ears are probably more
accustomed to the sounds of composers such as Mozart. Then you hear performance
of Schoenberg's, suit for piano Opus 25. To most audiences it
sounded like random chaos but what was Schoenberg doing? Opus 25 was actually the
first piece composed entirely using the 12-tone technique, which is a compositional
approach that
Schoenberg invented. Using this technique,
you order the 12 tones of the chromatic scale
in a particular order called a tone row. So here's an example
of a tone row. The idea is to make
sure that all 12 tones are equally emphasized. This creates a sort of democracy for tones don't relate
to a center like this. The C clearly has more
weight over the other notes. A tone row doesn't have this. I ended on C but
the whole phrase doesn't feel like
it's in C major. Schoenberg's rigid
ideas of a tonality never caught on with
a widespread audience. But artists from other
musical backgrounds would go on to explore
similar methods later in the 20th century. Most notably in jazz. - In 1961, the Bill
Evans Trio recorded and now legendary
live jazz album called Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Do you hear those
traditional ideas of harmony and
chord progressions? Now check out this
excerpt from Free Jazz, an album released that same year by saxophonist Ornette Coleman. This is one of the first
albums to usher in free jazz. A movement that like Schoenberg challenged traditional
ideas of tonality. The goal of artists like Coleman wasn't necessarily to get
each tone equal emphasis but rather to drop all the rules so they can express themselves
as freely as possible. You can hear it in the works
of artists like Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and
even John Coltrane. Soon after free jazz
took off in the 1960s three sisters from New Hampshire also began making music that
challenged traditional ideas of tonality and harmony
with a three piece band called The Shaggs but unlike
Coltrane or Schoenberg who were pushing music from
within established music scenes, The Shaggs we're definitely
pushing from the outside. - If someone thinks
The Shaggs are a bunch of no talent hillbillies,
I understand that. Shaggs music doesn't reach out. The way that conventional
pop reaches out and tries to, you know,
grab you with a hook. The Shaggs kind of exist
in a little bit of a bubble and you've got to get
inside that bubble. And that I think applies
to the best outsider music. It pulls you into
something really unusual and that's one of the
adventures of outsider music that I really love. If you don't like it, ignore it. Don't listen to me, it's okay. - One of the most famous
fans of outsider music was David Bowie who based his
Ziggy Stardust as alter ego in part on an outsider musician named Legendary Stardust Cowboy. While the bulk of outsider
music never ventures beyond open mics and
the record collections of a few dedicated
fans, Legendary
Stardust Cowboy's music has actually been played
in space, aboard Skylab the American space
station launched in 1973. Is that the bugle from
Legendary Stardust Cowboy? Yes - So what happens when a
composer wants to make a sound that can't be created by
a traditional instrument? You make your own. That's what American
composer Harry Partch did. Partch was interested
in micro-tonality and a 12 tone octave
just wasn't enough. He composed using 43 tones
within the traditional octave and created instruments
out of everything from old airplane
parts to liquor bottles so that he could play
his compositions. But no composer more boldly
challenged traditional ideas of music and confused
audiences in the process than John Cage an American whom
Arnold Schoenberg described as not a composer but
an inventor of genius. Cage knew how to
play and compose for traditional instruments
but he's most famous for writing compositions that
featured sounds generated from everyday objects. He also pioneered the
idea of the prepared piano A piano that's been
temporarily altered to produce exotic
and percussive sounds by placing objects like
screws, wood and rubber between the strings. - Cage left many
decisions up to chance to arrange his imaginary
landscape number four, which calls for 24
performers to turn 12 radios to certain volumes and
stations at specific times. Cage used an ancient
Chinese divination system called the I-ching to decide
what should come next. - Although cage was
making music with radios and definitely
not for the radio, his work has influenced
many well known musicians. John Cale of The Velvet
Underground was a student of Cage and Radiohead's
Thom Yorke called him one of his all-time art heroes. Let's find a template that
is completely non musical and then apply our
musical elements into it. A sentence from the English
language or like a shape. - It has to be like a dodecagon. - OK let's use this
word Sound Field. The name Sound Field. - Sound Field. - Like S sounds like this. - Oh - Why don't you take sound
and I will take field - Field? - Yeah and I won't share
how I'm interpreting it until after and you do the
same 'cause we can do it. - Ok - You can interpret it
because it looks this way or it sounds this way, it
feels this way, whatever. - That's gonna be tight - Let's do it. I'm more desensitized to
certain types of harmony and certain types of
textures the older I get. Once I'm exposed to
this type of dissonance, let's talk about dissonance. I get used to that. And then the next time I hear
it it's no longer as jarring. - Yeah it'll make you so curios. - Yeah kind of like food
you know, when you're a kid. The older you get, the more exposed you are to
different types of food I mean. I remember when I was a kid, I loved the smell of coffee
because it was sweet. But as soon as I tasted it I
thought, this isn't drinkable, this isn't edible. You acquire a taste for
it and then it changes. - That's probably how a
lot of fans of outsider music became fans because
when you first hear it's like, What? I don't know anybody falls
in love at the first sound. Where do you draw the line
between music and not music? That is on the comments
and please subscribe.
Great video!
My favorite Schoenberg anecdote is that he predicted that his 12-tone approach to composition was so objectively the best path forward with music that it would take over and children would hum 12-tone melodies when they skipped down the street on their way home from school.
One thing that people constantly get wrong though, when they say his music didn't catch on with wide audiences - Schoenberg taught composition in L.A. in the later part of his life, and many of his students would go on to write for the emerging new industry of film. Early film soundtracks were huge sprawling progressive compositions that incorporated all kinds of new techniques and theories, and while nobody was out there humming along or dancing along, they contributed to the successes of films. And even today those techniques appear in soundtracks that ARE popular. Not to mention, the music still is respected and performed in concert settings. Not as much as, say, Mozart or Beethoven, but I went to a concert in Istanbul last month and found myself in a packed concert hall full of people listening to modern 20th century inspired new works.
They're slightly off about Ornette. He wasn't trying to drop the rules to express himself, as they say. He wanted to paint around the rules to find new sounds. Yes, as a method for self expression, but he was searching for something new. Ornette could play the traditional stuff easily, so he carefully tried to sidestep every conventional sound he was programmed to play. His first albums were not noisy though, like the clip implies! He still played the blues! He still sang through his horn, expressed great emotion that anyone can connect with, and his band listened very carefully to each other and communicated and worked together. Same with that Coltrane clip - it was only a snippet of a building crescendo of group interplay. Coltrane still could play circles around everyone but by that point in his life he was reaching for new things. Arguably he was always reaching for new things - even the fully tonal and mostly-functional album Giant Steps was alien to people at the time of it's drop.