Can the science of pop bring lessons to Classical?

THE HEADLINE was clearly designed to be provocative. "Pop music today does all sound the same," declared an article in this paper (July 27th; url.ie/fo3d) about a study published in the journal Scientific Reports. The message was clear. A Reuters report, which the article quoted, explained that "A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serrà at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the past 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs had become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used."

A week later, Irish Times columnist Brian Boyd put it rather more colourfully ( url.ie/fo3e). "If you've felt alienated and irritated by the pop music charts over the past few years, console yourself: it's been scientifically proven that the music you listened to when you were younger actually was a whole lot better than the beat-infested, pop-assembly-line rubbish that now thumps its way out of your radio and clutters up the charts . . . It has got to the stage where you could swap songs around the handful of pop artists who dominate the singles charts and no one would really know the difference."

Now, I'm no expert in the pop music of the last 50 years, but it's easy to see where the authors – there were five researchers in all – are coming from. Their own summary (included with the full article at url.ie/fo27) states: "Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterising the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenisation of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation and increased the average loudness."

The analysis was carried out on information from the Million Song Dataset, “a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks”. It’s probably safe to assume that if the same amount of data were available from actual concerts, the volume levels would be even higher, the pitch transitions and timbral palette a little more varied, given the freedoms and vagaries of live gigs. Never mind. Let’s assume that the data is completely reliable, the analytic tools beyond reproach, and the conclusions about restricted pitch transitions and timbral homogenisation simply infallible.

What’s to be made of the whole issue? Are things necessarily getting worse? If we were to make a similar observation in literature, say, between a wordy, syntactically complex Victorian novel, and the altogether clearer style of a Hemingway, would we be right to conclude that the latter is of necessity more bland, simply because its technical means might be seen to be simpler?

And is the study likely to have any bearing on what’s been going on in the world of classical music since the end of the second World War? Well, technical simplicity, I’m inclined to suggest, tells you nothing about anything except technical simplicity. Is the famously tangled opening of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet better than the opening of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, simply because of its extraordinary harmonic progressions? Or is the celebrated Cavatina from Beethoven’s Quartet in B flat, Op. 130, inferior to the Grosse Fuge which was originally planned as that work’s finale, because its pitch transitions are simpler? And is Arvo Pärt’s widely-celebrated later work inferior to his now rarely-heard avant-garde pieces from the 1960s for similar reasons? I don’t think so.

The Scientific Reports research – and the media coverage it spawned – set me thinking about how classical music has been simplifying itself in so many ways for the last 50 or 60 years. In the broadest sense you could compare and contrast the often rebarbative complexities of post-war serialism with the smoother, simpler minimalism that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s, whose influence is still widely felt today.

But you could also look within the outputs of individuals. When Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote Gruppen for three orchestras in 1957 (complete not just with metronome marks that aren’t on any metronome, but with ones calculated using decimal points), it would have been hard to imagine that just over a decade later he would write an hour-long piece for six voices, Stimmung, that would essentially use just a single chord.

The music of Iannis Xenakis, who eschewed the patterns of serialism in favour of stochastic mathematics in the 1950s, also mellowed towards the end of the composer’s life (he died in 2001). And Pierre Boulez who wrote the gritty sets of Structures in the early 1950s, has long been showing a softer face, and taking care about what his listeners can handle.

As he explained to me in a 2004 interview ( url.ie/fo3f), if he has a regular pulse, the organisation of pitches can be altogether more complex, if the rhythm is inaccessible (that's the word he used), then he can simplify the pitches, so that the listener always has "something very, very solid to grasp".

And if you’ve been following the work of Gerald Barry, you’ll find that he, too, however demanding he remains on his performers, however perplexing his First Piano Quartet seems to be to Leaving Cert students, and however fond he remains of violence in his music, has also found his way back to a range of familiar harmonic material.

It’s true, too, that Jacobean music for viols was superseded by simpler music for violins, that the contrapuntal richness of Bach gave way to the simpler harmonies of the classical era, and that the tangles of post-Wagnerian chromaticism were followed by the self-conscious straightforwardness of neo-classicism.

What seems to be consistent, however, is the upset that any current trend is capable of causing to members of the establishment. Check out in George Grove's 1896 book ( url.ie/fo3g) how a number of eminent contemporary listeners met Beethoven's symphonies with incomprehension. And I remember reading an article on violin playing by violinist and critic Ferruccio Bonavia (1877-1950) in the journal Music Review where he bemoaned what he saw as a modern uniformity of playing style.

“When Ysaÿe, Sarasate and Joachim reigned it would have been impossible for the least experienced to mistake the one for the other. Today there is still a difference between players but it is not very striking; the style has no longer a personal stamp.”

So Menuhin, Heifetz, Oistrakh and Kreisler didn’t really sound all that different. Ah, the good old days. What kind of a world would it be if golden ages were to be in the present rather than in the past? And what will they be saying about the music and musicians of 2012 in 2062?