May 2024 Print

By Fr. Thibault de Maillard, translated by Mary Molline

At three o’clock in the morning, a seminarian in Écône was explaining his surprise during the Midnight Mass that had just ended: the polyphonic piece at the Communion began with a long note that he had mistaken for the fire alarm! He had only realized his mistake at the second note. This mistake had, however, brought him to see the distinction between the two components of music: the static component—the sounds in and of themselves, regardless of their mutual relations—and the dynamic component, that creates a relation in time between the notes.

This distinction makes it possible to analyze and judge the music we generically call rock,¹ rap, and other forms of pop and atonal music. For this critical analysis, it is important to make a careful distinction between the material aspect, the static component—and the formal aspect, the dynamic component. The essential part of musicality belongs to the latter, and it should be the major grounds of any musical critique. In the listener’s imagination, this formal aspect takes on, as it were, an existence of its own, which the philosopher Francis Wolff analyzes using the four causes. This approach proves particularly effective in showing the weaknesses of the incriminated music and offers solid grounds for two reproaches made to these recent musical compositions, mostly related to their efficient cause: their musical poverty and their vulgarity. In a day and age that no longer takes the final cause into consideration, this study will enable us to see whether music, too, has excluded this, the last of the four causes.

I. The Static Components of Music

The static components of music are the sounds used, regardless of their mutual relations in time. For example, a note played on the organ has defined qualities: a pitch, a duration of a few seconds, an intensity, that is to say, a volume, and a tone, for example, that of a pipe. The poor quality of the musical means used (for example, a poor-quality pipe resulting in an imperfect tone) can be a cause for musical criticism. For this criticism to be valid, it must, however, remain in its proper place. A study of the various types of rock music under the angle of the four static components will show us the limits of a criticism based only on this criterion, and we will then go on to see how this criticism can be better formulated from the other angle of the dynamic component.

1. The Pitch

The first static component of music is its absolute pitch. A musical sound differs from the sounds of nature by its set pitch.² The different musical pitches cover a scale of sounds (the notes on a piano, for example), whereas the song of a bird does not respect a set scale: the sounds it produces are always on slightly different pitches. Different civilizations have developed their sound scales to varying degrees: a single pitch for certain primitive tribes (Patagonia), three or five (Africa and Japan), eight for Gregorian chant, twelve for classical music, and even more for China.³ These musical scales are like a color palette for a painter: if he has only two colors, black and white (two sounds), he will still be able to create either a magnificent work or a clumsy childish drawing of “daddy,” depending on his skill. In and of themselves, the sounds are not the movement: it is the movement that gives them the form of a melody, and this melody can be brilliant, or it can be insipid.

The number of sounds on a musical scale is therefore not entirely decisive for a judgment on the quality of the music. The composers of rap use fewer notes than the classical composers:⁴ in the rapper Orelsan’s⁵ latest album,⁶ for example, there is a total of four notes, and Jul,⁷ another popular rapper, uses five.⁸ These scales of four or five notes can seem poor compared to the twelve notes classical music uses. But it would be hasty to criticize a piece based only on this factor: the Agnus Dei VIII also uses only four notes.⁹ The oldest Gregorian pieces often use only five main notes. The scale used is only a pure possibility, one element that receives its real worth based on others that situate or enrich it. It steers the musical development in a given direction (harmonic or rhythmic) but does not restrict it.

Not only is the wealth of the scales used in no way decisive but the pitch of the notes taken separately (low or high) does nothing to strictly disqualify a musical composition either. Lower notes do speak more to the body. “The acoustic vibrations are transmitted to the entire organism and the more intense and lower the sound is, the more they make it vibrate; as the lower harmonics are more powerful and stable, their amplitude favors to their propagation and reverberation in the lower cavities of the body, the abdomen and the thorax.”¹⁰ But contemporary composers are not the only ones who exploit the potential of low-pitch resonance; alongside heavy metal, rap, and free jazz, Boëllmann,¹¹ Chopin,¹² Stravinsky, and the Baroque composers use viola da gamba, organ pedals, and timpani. The low-pitch sound scale uses the body as a soundbox, but the composer is still free, when using this matter, to express either a rich and complex or a poor and indigent musical vocabulary.

Another element related to pitch is chords. Chords are combinations of different-pitched sounds, and they can be more or less diversified in a piece. A chord can be consonant, gentle on the ear—or dissonant, tense. A basic method for rock improvisation¹³ mostly teaches two chords on the piano: the fifth (consonant) and the seventh (dissonant). These same chords can be found in rap music, although a number of recent pieces avoid using the seventh.¹⁴ A relative harmonic poverty can be noted, but it does not exclude the possibility of the music being rich in its movement; on this angle, too, many forms of music have no harmony, and no one would think of criticizing them.

2. The Duration

Each note taken separately can last for a shorter or longer amount of time. We are simply going to point out here that their duration has an affinity with certain movements. A short duration goes along with a momentum. The repetition of very short sound movements, specialists have measured, can even go so far as to cause a brain saturation that can provoke a state of stress: this is one of the reproaches made to techno. A long duration goes along with relaxation. In this respect, can we not consider slow rock a relaxing form of music? We can see how it may be necessary to go farther for a global critique of rock music.

3. The Intensity

The volume is also a common argument used to criticize rock music. We must, however, point out that it is not a distinctive characteristic of rock. More classical genres have also sought to force volume records. The eighteenth century tried having several hundred musicians play Handel’s Messiah.¹⁵ Raves set up walls of loudspeakers to hear the sound more strongly. The intensity affects the body of the listener. Any given music, be it Gregorian or heavy metal, if listened to with earbuds at a dangerously high volume, makes the entire body vibrate. Nonetheless, certain types of music seem to have a need to be played at a loud volume: is this a sign of a lack of certain necessary elements? The answer to this question belongs to a specifically musical analysis.

4. The Tone

The tone is the last static component of music. Francis Wolff says that “the tone is the sound matter of music, since it is nothing but sound; but it is already the primary ‘form’ of the sound ‘matter.’ Music is given a sound form, and the tone is this sound form.”¹⁶ The use of the tone in the different musical genres is anything but insignificant: the Beatles probably owe their success at least partially to the high-pitched tone of their songs that contrasted with the darker tone of the blues of their time. The tone is yet another tool, but it is nothing more than a tool, even if it can serve as a form of suggestion, and to a certain extent affect the body.

II. The Dynamic Components of Music

Painting is “the representation of objects without movement” and music is “the representation of movements without an object.”¹⁷ Pure movements, changes in organized, ordered sounds, but without organizing or ordering any object in itself: music is pure movement. This is where we come to the distinction between the real cause and the imaginary cause of musical sounds. These sounds are produced by instruments played by musicians: that is their real cause. But when we hear music, our imagination also hears causal relations between the sounds, and that is their imaginary cause. It is on this level that music is a representation of movement without an object. Music offers us not an image of violins responding to each other but of melodies in dialogue and movement. If there are causal relations between the sounds, then they can be analyzed in the light of the four causes, and that is what Francis Wolff does in his Pourquoi la musique? (Why Music?).

1. The Material Cause

Constantly in motion, music could be called Heraclitan. And yet, the ear perceives musical events that are so regular that the imagination construes them as not changing. These movements include the regular pulse of the rhythm¹⁸ and the dominant presence of certain pitches.¹⁹ That which appears to the imagination as never changing is to be considered as the material cause. All music has this material cause, but not all music highlights it in the same way.

Between the art of saying everything without affirming anything and the art of affirming everything without saying anything is to be found the difference between a refined linguistic style and a vulgar expression. Vulgarity and coarseness are characteristic of someone who affirms something excessively or presents shameful or ugly objects. Hard rock delivers its beat with such vehemence that it becomes vulgar, like a truism repeated over and over in a conversation. But a good number of rap pieces express their rhythm more gently²⁰ and are comparable to popular music.²¹ The vehemence of the material cause makes music a moving force, which explains why military marches make such use of it. Reinforcing the pulsation, apart from its moving effect on the body, facilitates the intellectual perception of the unchanging element; music that uses this approach is easier to understand from the angle of its material causality.

2. The Formal Cause

While the pulse and the scale (material causes) remain the same, a good number of other parameters change, and the imagination seeks to understand “how what changes, changes.” Do the new notes that are different resemble the notes that preceded them? For example, is it the same pattern but played on a higher pitch? If the melody and the pitch are both different, is there still a rhythmic continuity? Etc. This is the formal cause of music. The static components of a piece—pitch, duration, intensity, and tone—are so many tools at the composer’s disposal with which he can imprint different forms. The listener’s memory records the past notes and his intelligence ties them in with the present notes and tries to understand. With respect to the tempo, it is the rhythm that provides organization, for example, when the measures can be heard thanks to the accent of a pulse every three beats. The notion of melody adds different pitches to a continuity of notes that already have their rhythm.

In a children’s song, the forms are very simple (a binary rhythmic form most of the time and notes that “touch each other”). But this is also the case with Gregorian psalmody (a free rhythmic form and a melody restricted to a limited scale) or with Ravel’s Bolero (the melody repeated over and over constitutes an easily recognizable form). Evidently, rap uses this same simplicity, seeing as rappers like to recite on a chord based on a single habitual different sound and to apply a binary rhythm: the verses they recite are generally eight feet long, in groups of four or two.²² Simplicity is only synonymous with poverty in this case if it fails to highlight some other dimension of the composition. If the objective is to facilitate the intelligibility of a text, who would reproach a religious for reciting the psalms on a single note?

3. The Efficient Cause

The intelligence principally comes into play in music with respect to the two causes that act as driving forces: the efficient cause that launches the movement, and the final cause that draws to itself. The efficient cause allows the listener to understand present events in the light of past events on the level of the imagination. Some of its tools are: repetition (if I hear “do do si si fa fa fa la” three times, I imagine the first three series to be the cause of the fourth series when I hear the pattern repeated a fourth time), similarity (after having heard the first notes of a fugue, I understand what follows as a similar declension of the first pattern), or melodic proximity (Au clair de la lune begins with notes that are all next to each other), and harmonic proximity (C major is next to C minor).

The music of the rapper Orelsan cannot claim to be rich in efficient causes, any more than a Gregorian psalm can. He often tirelessly repeats the same pattern throughout the entire song. In Shonen, a high-pitched recitation is added on to this uniformity. In this case, the uniformity of the causality results in monotony, and the composer probably realized this: he does not use any other musical levers to distract the audience, but only some sparse onomatopoeia. However, the proximity of the notes used, the coherency between the instruments and the recitation chord, often encountered in the music of other rappers, allow the imagination to find proportionate causes to the musical movements heard.²³

Rock or certain rap styles that seek to impress are very different. The regular and reinforced beat ensures a very effective movement. The musical tools used are comparable to fast food that tends towards an excess: excessively sweet or excessively salty. An excess in the changes of musical color²⁴ that are abrupt and make leaps that would only be possible with seven-league boots in the biped world.²⁵ An excess of tense chords,²⁶ that are neither prepared nor resolved and in this context act like whiplashes.²⁷ An excess in the movements²⁸ of several voices in the same direction, like a ten-year-old suddenly jumping into his mother’s arms: staggering!²⁹ Just as McDonald’s menus are easy to appreciate because the flavors are very primary (sweet or salty), Afro-American music also offers easily perceived flavors. Between a seventh chord that grabs onto you and a fifth that is relaxing but very present, the intelligence has no trouble discerning a relation of tension-relaxation, that creates an imaginary cause-effect couple that is as easy to decipher as a Coke is to drink!

Besides the fact it is so easy to perceive, there is also the cause of this easiness: the strength of the levers used. A strength that, in the order of the musical movement, is excessive. An excess that need not be qualified on a moral level, like vulgarity or coarseness would be, but that presents movements, which, in our imagination, are equal to the great upheavals of this world: the eruption of a volcano, the outbreak of a war or the folly of a mad love. Listening to this music too frequently thus exposes us to a loss of our ability to taste due to these excesses, but also to a diminishing of our musical discernment, due to the habit of analyzing only simplistic musical movements. Rock music and rap, both of which have these two qualities—excess and simplism—can consequently be accused of coarseness and indigence. Their crude nature makes them degrading and is the sign of a true decline in civilization.

4. The Final Cause

Music moves. The listener can explain its movements by means of past causes, but also by means of future motives. From the angle of the final cause, that “draws the music” to it, the expectations can be rhythmic, as in the case of syncopation.³⁰ They can also be harmonic, when a dissonance seeks its natural resolution,³¹ and melodic, if the trajectory of the pitches seeks to land on the tonic, the ground-note of the piece.

All tonal music—and this goes for rap and rock, but also for Gregorian chant written in a specific tone—has a tonic (the first note of the scale) and therefore a certain melodic expectation of resting on this tonic at the end. The expectation of the tonic note is made possible by the clear affirmation of the mode used. Some music prefers not to state its mode clearly: in this case, the listener does not wait as expectantly for the arrival of the tonic. Gregorian chant sometimes leaves us in doubt, as do certain rock pieces that change their tonality often. This diminishes the tension. The difference being that by weakening the tension Gregorian chant “aims for an evanescence of the body through the elation of the soul, whereas [Pink Floyd and the musical genre Stoner Rock] aim rather for an evanescence of the soul through the elation of the body.”³²

As far as rhythmic expectations go, syncopation is a common practice, especially in funk and jazz music; in the musical genres closer to rock, the beat is too important to be silenced.³³ Harmonic expectations are also missing in these musical genres. Not only do the composers refuse to bow to the complexities of classical harmonization, but the dissonance they employ (sevenths and sometimes ninths) is never resolved. The listener has to get used to not expecting any solution to the musical conflicts he perceives. As Francis Wolff accurately points out, “the listener is in a state of constant physical tension, sometimes to an extreme. But he is free of any musical tension, in other words, any surprise and therefore any frustrated expectations. We might be tempted to say that this music has no relaxation rather than that it has no tension, if the two expressions were not synonyms when it comes down to it, since they are correlates.”³⁴

Rock music does not produce many musical expectations, but atonal music, in its own realm, produces absolutely none. Francis Wolff calls it “music full of absent causality.”³⁵ “Full of absent causality” because it has all the musical conditions for the listener to seek the imaginary causes of what he hears. There are defined pitches, perceptible durations, a volume, and controlled tones. All the matter needed for music is there and the listener tries to hear the four causes of music. However, the musical causality is mostly “absent” because the auditor hears only the material and formal causalities. The sounds follow upon each other without any internal coherency that the intelligence can perceive.³⁶ They do not seem to come from any internal cause in the music and they produce no expectations either. The efficient and final causes are truly absent.

Conclusion

The static components are only the matter of music. Criticizing rock music based only on these criteria would also oblige us to question Gregorian chant, children’s songs, military music, and many works in many different musical styles. It is better to concede that a true material poverty can be subjugated by a richer form. For a criticism of rock music to be constructive, it has to be based on the dynamic components (the form of the music). This makes the verdict incisive: a material cause that makes frequent use of vulgarity, an extremely simple formal cause, an excessive or simplistic efficient cause—often both at once—and an all-but-absent final cause. Rap presents a similar musical poverty even though some of its more recent compositions no longer necessarily go to the same extremes.

The intelligence, the analyst of the four causes, is only moderately solicited by the efficient causality of rock music; it is the body that is most solicited: the beat speaks above all to the body by means of the cardiac and respiratory binarity that it joins. The mind, if too often fed “ketchup and fries” music, quickly becomes incapable of tasting the fine wines of musical intelligence and becomes submerged in a materialism that excludes the participation of the mind in the works of the body. Rock music has consecrated the crossbreeding of the African musical cultures (with their rhythmic tendencies) with the Western musical cultures (that are more polyphonic). While this mixture could lead to a mutual enrichment, it is nonetheless conditioned by a significant impoverishing of each of the two cultures involved: and that is indeed the other side of the coin of the modern parable of multiculturalism. As for Gregorian chant, it recognizes that its origin is lowly—its very simple melody flows at a regular rhythm—but it is able, as a work of art, to draw a portrait of the living God.

Endnotes

¹ This term will be used throughout the article to designate all of Afro-Western music.

² That is to say, considered only in itself, regardless of a note’s relations with other notes.

³ The development of musical scales follows two laws that are based on the nature of sound: the accumulation of fifths, which are the first different harmonic, and the succession of harmonics. See Bernard Maurin, Nature-culture en musique ou Cheminements de l’homo musicus, Société de musicologie du Languedoc, 1992.

⁴ With the dodecaphonic system (twelve sounds).

⁵ Aurélien Cotentin, who goes by the name of Orelsan, born in 1982.

⁶ Tetraphonic: for example, the song “Shonen” in his album Civilisation that came out in November 2021and sold over 350,000 copies.

⁷ Julien Mari, who goes by the name of Jul, born in 1990.

⁸ Pentaphonic: for example, the song “Aghju capitu” in his album Indépendance that came out in December 2021 and sold over 100,000 copies.

⁹ Tetraphonic.

¹⁰ Francis Wolff, Pourquoi la musique? (Fayard, 2015) p. 96, reference to: Cristina Cano, La musique au cinéma: musique, image récit (Gremse, 2010), p. 172.

¹¹ For example, Toccata from the Suite gothique.

¹² For example, Étude no. 9 that punctuates the arpeggios played by the right hand with strong octave chords played by the left hand.

¹³ Pierre Minvielle-Sébastia, Initiation au piano Rock, Keyboard Connection.

¹⁴ For example, the song “Outro” in Ninho’s album Jefe, the best 24-hour début of the year 2021.

¹⁵ “As early as 1784, that is, twenty-five years after the musician’s death, the Messiah was performed at Westminster Abbey by 275 instrumentalists and 300 chorists, then, in 1883, it was performed at the Crystal Palace by 400 musicians!” https://www.radioclassique.fr/magazine/articles/le-messie-de-haendel-grace-a-son-alleluia-cet-oratorio-remporte-tous-les-suffrages/

¹⁶ Wolff, Ibid., p. 149.

¹⁷ Video by the ENS “Un entretien autour de l’ouvrage: Pourquoi la musique?,” April 14, 2015. http://www.franciswolff.fr

¹⁸ In the Vivace of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata no. 6, the pedal marks only the first beat of the measure in three passages. The immobility in the movements introduces the listener almost into a sort of eternity.

¹⁹ This is the case with the tonic pedal in certain medieval songs, and, more generally speaking, with every tonic note, the “base” note of any musical movement.

²⁰ In the album Sous le soleil, by low-stream rapper Mighty Max, the drums are fairly gentle. Along the same lines, there is Student Kay in his single “Je compose” that “goes back and forth between gentle acoustics and a fierce beat, between lyrism and brutality.” https://konbini.com/popculture/rappeurs-francais-moins-10-000-vues/

²¹ For example, the singles “Loup noir” by SCH and “La Nuit” by Sopico, that are accompanied only by guitar.

²² In the songs cited above, Jul recites only on a high B flat, Orelsan on a high A and Nino on C and D, with regular melodic developments borrowed from Rai, a musical style taken from Algerian folklore. The local rhythm is binary, but a larger overall rhythm is easy to hear. In the song “Dead,” Sopico recites lines with eight feet.

²³ Exceptions such as the singles “Loup Noir” by SCH, that has a comprehensible melodic progression and regression, or “Dead” by Sopico, show by contrast the lack of an efficient cause in many other rap songs as far as the melody goes.

²⁴ In musical terms, “harmonic modulations.”

²⁵ Going from a melody played only on the white keys of the piano (C major) to a melody played on the white keys and one black key (F major), is a gentle change. But going from C major (no black keys) to E major (four black keys) without any transition is much more violent. Composers habitually make the change progressively, the way we shift gears in a car.

²⁶ To be precise, dissonant chords.

²⁷ The musical style can attenuate a disregard for these rules to the point of making it imperceptible. In the music we are discussing, the style rather highlights these violent modulations by its extreme simplicity.

²⁸ In musical terms, both “direct movements” and “parallelisms.”

²⁹ Pierre Minvielle-Sébastia (Ibid.), illustrates all the different styles of rock and abundantly shows how universally relevant these critiques are.

³⁰ “A sound that begins with a weak beat or a weak part of a beat and then continues on to a strong beat or the strong part of a beat.” Adolphe Danhauser, Théorie de la musique, Henry Lemoine, Paris, 1996, p. 42.

³¹ For example, the seventh chord, which is dissonant, creates an expectation of the octave in which it is “resolved,” so to speak.

³² Wolff, Ibid., p. 193.

³³ We could point out that Solesmes’ “tension-release” interpretation of Gregorian chant gives it a rhythmic final cause, presenting an objection to Francis Wolff’s theory that Gregorian chant has no final cause.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Wolff, Ibid., p. 79-80.

³⁶ See Jérôme Ducros’ conference on Youtube: “L’atonalisme, et après ?”

IMAGES: The Ghent Altarpiece: Singing Angels, 1432.