But even the great poet is conditioned by such systems, even when he decides to pay absolutely no heed to the expectations of the public. The statistical probabilities of finding an unusual rhyme for the word «remember» are fairly limited. As a result, he is either restricted in his rhyming or in his themes, or in both. He will have to avoid using the word «remember» at the end of a line.
An artistic achievement requires such a rich interpenetration of sound and sense that the moment the poet uses a sound that has no semantic resonance in an audience whose sensibility responds only to habit, the form he proposes will have very little (if any) power of communication. On the other hand, he will always have the possibility of resorting to an unusual language, a peculiar rhyme pattern, and this will, in turn, determine his themes and the association of his ideas.
Even here, he will be acted upon by a situation, but his awareness of it and of his alienation will allow him to turn it to his advantage, to transform it into a means to freedom. Take Montale’s unexpected rhymes, for instance: in his poetry, the alienation of a strained dialectic tension has been resolved into a prime example of invention and poetic freedom. Yet every particular solution can, and generally does, become the basis for a new alienating situation. All of Montale’s imitators are perfect examples of this: their lack of imagination is the sure sign of their alienation to a particular form (not their own) that determines their actions without allowing them the slightest chance of being original or free.
But this example is much too simple to explain such a complex situation. In the case of rhyme, the dialectic between invention and imitation manifests itself only at the level of a literary convention that can remain marginal and not affect all the structures of a language. Let’s therefore shift our attention to a problem that is more pertinent to contemporary culture.
The tonal system has governed the development of music from the Renaissance to our own day: as a system, and an acquired system at that (nobody believes any longer that tonality is a «natural» fact), the role of the tonal system in music is very similar to that played by rhyme in poetry. The tonal musician composes his pieces by obeying a system he is at odds with. Whenever a symphony concludes triumphantly by insisting on the tonic, the musician has let the system act on its own, since he could do nothing to elude the convention on which it was based. But within this convention, the great musician can always invent new ways to repropose the system.
There are times, however, when a musician feels compelled to move out of the system—Debussy, for instance, does it by using the «hexatonal» scale. He decides to move out of the system because he senses that the tonal grammar forces him to say things he does not want to say. Schonberg breaks definitely with the old system and elaborates a new one. Stravinsky, in contrast, accepts it, but only during a particular phase of his production, and in the only possible way: by parodying it—that is, by questioning it even as he glorifies it.
This revolt against the tonal system, however, concerns more than the dialectic between invention and manner. One does not leave a system merely because its conventions have become too rigid and its web of inventive possibilities has been exhausted. In other words, one does not reject a system merely because one cannot escape the sterile duet «remember/September.» The musician refuses the tonal system because its structure mirrors or embodies a world view.
It has been repeatedly said that tonal music is a system in which, once a given tonality has been chosen, the whole composition is articulated through a series of crises and dilations deliberately provoked in order to reestablish, by the final reconfirmation of the tonic, a state of peace and harmony. The final repose is all the more enjoyable the longer it has been delayed. Many people have also maintained that this type of formal habit has its roots in a society based on respect for an immutable order of things; in other words, tonal music is merely another way of reiterating the basic attitude of an entire educational system at both a social and a theoretical level.»
Obviously, to postulate such a perfect reflective relationship between a social structure and the structure of a musical language may appear a hasty generalization; yet it is not by chance that, in our day, tonal music has become the music of an occasional community of people, brought together by the ritual of going to concerts— people who like to express their aesthetic sensibility at a particular time of the day, wearing a particular kind of clothing, and who pay the price of admission in order to undergo an experience of crisis and resolution, so that when they leave the «temple» they will feel fully purged by the cathartic effect of art.
A musician becomes aware of the crisis of the tonal system the moment he realizes that certain sonic frequencies have so long been identified with particular psychological states that the listener can no longer hear them without instinctively relating them to a particular moral, ideological, or social reality, to a particular vision of the world. When, in order to escape this dead end, the avantgarde musician founds a new language, a new system of sonic relationships, a new musical form that few people are ready to recognize as such, he condemns himself to noncommunication, to some sort of aristocratic distance. But he does it on purpose, to express his refusal of a system of communication that guarantees him an audience if, and only if, he is willing to submit to an obsolete value system.
So, the avantgarde musician rejects the tonal system not only because it alienates him to a conventional system of musical laws, but also because it alienates him to a social ethics and to a given vision of the world. Of course, the moment he breaks away from the accepted system of communication and renounces its advantages, he will inevitably appear to be involved in an antihuman activity, whereas in fact he has engaged in it in order to avoid mystifying and deceiving his public. By rejecting a musical model, the avantgarde musician actually rejects (more or less consciously) a social model. But it would be wrong to assume that this double rejection involves no affirmation.
The musical system that the avantgarde musician rejects communicates only in appearance. In fact, it is exhausted, dried out. It can no longer surprise anyone, since it can produce only cliches. It has become Muzak, or the average popular song, the usual triptych of loss that sees memory fade at an autumnal hearth—»remember,» «November,» «ember.» The situation evoked is sad, depressing; yet cast in those familiar images, it no longer evokes any emotion. We have encountered it too often.
It has lost all meaning and has become merely a refrain, a sort of lullabye. Rather than impressing us with the melancholy it depicts, it simply reconfirms all our false assumptions. It tells us that the universe we live in is still as orderly and dependable as it used to be—which, of course, is far from true. Our universe is in full crisis. The order of words no longer corresponds to the order of things: whereas the former still insists on following a traditional system, the latter seems to be mostly characterized by disorder and discontinuity, or so science tells us.
Our feelings and emotions have been frozen into stereotypical expressions that have nothing to do with our reality. Social laws still rest on orderly systems that hardly reflect the social instability of our time. In other words, language offers us a representation of the phenomenal world that has nothing to do with the one we encounter on a daily basis. In fact, our world is quite different from the orderly, coherent universe our language still promotes, and much much closer to the dislocated, fragmented vision presented by the avantgarde artist in rupture with the established system.
The artist who protests through form acts on two levels. On one, he rejects a formal system but does not obliterate it; rather, he transforms it from within by alienating himself in it and by exploiting its selfdestructive tendencies. On the other, he shows his acceptance of the world as it is, in full crisis, by formulating a new grammar that rests not on a system of organization but on an assumption of disorder.
And this is one way in which he implicates himself in the world in which he lives, for the new language he thinks he has invented has instead been suggested to him by his very existential situation. He has no choice, since his only alternative would be to ignore the existence of a crisis, to deny it by continuing to rely on the very systems of order that have caused
