The Anti-Music

The Sainte Chapelle in París

We live in a paradoxical age. On the one hand, many still appreciate beauty; but on the other hand, the modern world seems incapable of producing beauty. The concert halls still fill up every time Mozart´s Requiem is performed; every day thousands queue to enter the great art galleries of the world, where the world´s masterpieces of fine arts are exhibited, such as El Prado in Madrid, The National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, etc .; there are always flocks of tourists wandering around Venice, paying tribute to the most beautiful city in the world. However, music, works of art, and buildings of any kind that are created today are almost all immeasurably ugly. On top of that, the public hates them. All you have to do is go to a avant-garde classical music concert or take a walk through a modern art museum; in spite of all the publicity and institutional support, only a handful of people are interested.

How is it possible that there is such an abyss between modern-day artistic creations and the real tastes of the people? As a musician and conservatory teacher, I can speak with knowledge about what happens in the world of music. Within classical music, also sometimes known as "serious music", there are two types of composers: first, there are the composers who compose for their enjoyment and for the enjoyment of their audience. They may be more or less successful, have better or worse taste, but the truth is that they try to create music that someone will like. In other words, their compositions aspire to be beautiful in some sense. Then there are the composers who could not care less if their music is liked; normally they do not even like it themselves. What motivates them is not a quest for beauty in their compositions, but being on the cutting edge, following the most avant-garde trends. They have an idea in their head and they follow it, without caring about how their music really sounds.

Arnold Schoenberg, another jew who,
like Karl Marx, opened up a door to the Revolution

To understand how this disconnect between the composer and the audience came about, we have to go back to Arnold Schoenberg, who in the 1920s invented a new method of composition, dodecaphonism, or the twelve-tone technique. According to this system, all the twelve tones of the scale had absolute equality, the opposite of the traditional tonal system in the West. Dodecaphonism works by following a predetermined order of the twelve tones, called a series, which is subjected to quasi-mathematical operations. Schoenberg was a great composer and some works of his first expressionist stage are worth listening to; the problem is that he opened Pandora's box, and after him classical music descended into a decadent spiral of madness. By working with a system, an idea, rather than what our ears perceive and what our intelligence is capable of understanding, Schoenberg gave birth to the category of anti-music, which as well as being ugly, often even delights in it own ugliness. If the reader does not believe me, let him listen for himself to this quartet by Anton Webern, one of Schoenberg's disciples.

The composers who dominated the classical music scene of the '50s and' 60s did nothing but sink deeper into the chasm that Schoenberg had opened up, and many are still stuck down there today. As in the fine arts, composers sought above all to surprise. It was no longer necessary to acquire even the basic notions of musicianship to be a great composer. An example is the architect, Iannis Xenakis, who "composed" his experimental works with computers, using mathematical formulas. It was the heyday of the charlatan composer, whose only rule was that there were no rules. As in the fine arts, music was reduced to the idea of ​​its creator. One of the most respected figures in the experimental music circle was Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, among other brilliant ideas, composed a piece for string quartet and four helicopters. Nobody cares how the piece sounds; nobody finds it beautiful. All that matters is that he had an original idea and did something that nobody had thought of before; that is why he achieved fame and is in all the history of music books.

Part of "A Musician´s Hell" by Hieronymus Bosch. I wouldn´t be
surprised if they are being treated to a performance of Stockhausen´s music!

I think that the composers who choose to go down the avant-garde path, the anti-music path, do so for one of three reasons: 1. they are people who lack the necessary talent to create music that people want to listen to; 2. they are too lazy to carry out the arduous job of composing real music, and prefer the shortcut of conceptual music; 3. they are a combination of both. It is truly amazing how nowadays anything can become a work of art. All an avant-garde composer has to do is give explanations full of clever, multisyllabic words, as he illustrates on a blackboard the mathematical formulas he has used, and hey-presto! a succession of unbearable noises suddenly turn into sublime music. I have sat through lectures by world-renowned composers whose music has no greater interest than the noise of a drill. Either they are con artists of the worst kind or they are madmen who have completely lost touch with reality. I think the former probably leads to the latter.

The really extraordinary thing is that, despite the fact that the general public shows ZERO interest in the experimental fantasies of the anti-music crowd, official institutions continue to support it. Contemporary music festivals are constantly being organized (and subsidized), so that empty halls can listen to the infernal noises that the elite calls music. The composers that are awarded scholarships, who gain professorships at the leading universities and conservatories, whose works are premiered with orchestras that depend on public money, are usually proponents of anti-music. Again and again, I have seen how a concert that includes a "contemporary" work in its program will typically get HALF the audience it could normally expect. The anti-music is only propped up by subsidies, a bit like the Spanish cinema of the socialist era, which year after year was offered to empty theatres, loosing millions, paid for by tax payers´ money. If governments and official bodies care so little about the numbers; if they insist on ramming this anti-music down our throats, it must be because their support for this abominable "art" follows an agenda. It must be because there is a conspiracy to destroy the aesthetic sense of the people. It must be because there is a war being waged against beauty.

Reflecting on anti-music, it is interesting to note the relationship between what happened in the world during the twentieth century and the war against music. The most influential theorist of the post-war musical avant-garde, Theodor Adorno, an atheist Jew, expressly linked the "new music" with his communist convictions. He himself drew a parallel between the destruction of the traditional tonal system of music and the overthrow of the moral customs and social structures of the bourgeoisie. Apart from being an important music critic, Adorno was one of the big names in the creation of the Fankfurt School, the school of sociological and philosophical studies, from a distinctly Marxist perspective, which has so influenced the destruction of Western culture. A discussion of the Frankfurt School exceeds the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that in the last 60 years almost all of its subversive objectives have been met.

We can go further in the parallelism between the deliberate disintegration of tonality, which has been the basis of Western music since the Middle Ages, and the struggle of the Revolution against Catholic Tradition. Western music, from the liturgical song of the monks of the sixth century, which later would take the name of Gregorian chant in reference to Pope St. Gregory the Great, has always been classified in modes or tonalities. This means that, according to the piece, there are notes of the scale that are more important than others. It took centuries for the rules of harmony and counterpoint to be codified, as they were based on an organic development of musical language. Musical styles and genres evolved like the other arts; according to cultural and social changes, thanks to technical inventions, and depending on the aesthetic tastes of each era. It was not until the twentieth century that anyone ever set about to destroy the foundations of tonality and replace it with a new and totally artificial language. The natural hierarchy between the notes of the scale was replaced by an anti-natural egalitarianism. The musical heritage of the past, the result of centuries of organic growth, was rejected, to be replaced with an instantaneous, artificial creation, which by definition is incapable of connecting aesthetically with its listeners. The imposition of the New Mass by Pope Paul VI was the result of a very similar anti-traditional mentality.

Benedictine monasteries are the cradle of Western civilization and where
classical music was born.

The revolutionaries of today hate the legacy of Christianity, and that is why they insist so much on the laicism of the State. They want to replace Christianity, that built the West, with religious indifferentism, a void. To achieve this end, they launched a campaign of anti-Christian propaganda, ranging from the theory of Evolution in schools, to television series that mock the Catholic religion. In the same way that avant-garde music has emptied the concert halls, this constant attack against Christianity has emptied the churches. The problem that many secularists have perhaps not yet considered is how to deal with external threats, once they have destroyed the engine of their own civilization and turned their citizens into hedonistic sheep. The day the West needs soldiers to defend its borders and cities, it will not find them. If in the early twentieth century the elite of the musical world had not turned its back on the general public, wasting its time writing atrocious noise that no one wanted to hear, the devastating effects of Rock & Roll in the '50s could have been mitigated. The problem is that previously there had been a mass desertion; people had already become disconnected from classical music.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney make satanic hand signs
on the cover of their album Yellow Submarine

It is interesting to note that in Eastern European countries, which, being on the other side of the Iron Curtain, were protected from the harmful influence of Rock & Roll, the appreciation for good music (among which I include traditional folk music) remains intact. Communism, in spite of all its crimes, did something right; it promoted good music and kept its citizens safe from the moral degeneration ushered in by Pop culture in the West. In addition, anti-music, which in the West did so much damage in the field of serious music, was banned by the Soviet authorities, because they considered it a "decadent music", devoid of interest to the people, and in this they were absolutely right . During the years of the Soviet Union, although the US overcame its great rival in technological and sporting endeavours, the pianists and violinists of the Eastern Bloc put western musicians to shame. After the fall of communism, there was an influx of Western influences in Eastern Europe, but the negative impact was much less profound or enduring than than expected, and now we are witnessing a true spiritual and cultural rebirth in these countries. For example, nowadays the Russians feel an overflowing patriotic love for the music of Tchaikovsky, their orchestras and their conservatories are still among the best in the world, and their musicians enjoy a status that is unthinkable here in Spain. In Russia, not only some 30,000 churches have been opened since the fall of communism 30 years ago (equivalent to THREE new churches a day); also theaters and auditoriums are built throughout the country, since the demand for classical music is growing incessantly.

The antidote for anti-music is good music, which in the West arose from the liturgical music of the Catholic Church and underwent centuries of organic evolution. The classical tradition, with great composers such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, is directly opposed to what many in the academic sphere call music today. The former is traditional, the latter is anti-traditional. In our fight against the Revolution it is important not to neglect the culture war. On the counterrevolutionary side, we not only fight to defend the dogma and moral teachings of the Church, but also to preserve the cultural heritage of the West in all its artistic manifestations. Good music, not only classical music, but also traditional folk music that belongs to the people, is a cultural treasure that we must know how to appreciate and protect.