Richard Gray, a science correspondant for the Telegraph, recently wrote a piece that states “Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope.” In his article Gray makes note of some of the current brain research that offers some insights into why atonal music is so difficult for audiences to listen to. Quoting Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct, Gray writes:
“The brain is a pattern seeking organ, so it looks for patterns in music to make sense of what we hear. The music of Bach, for example, embodies a lot of the pattern forming process.
“Some of the things that were done by those composers such as Schoenberg undermined this cognitive aid for making music easier to understand and follow. Schoenberg’s music became fragmented which makes it harder for the brain to find structure.”
Research by David Huron at Ohio State University also suggests that anticipating patterns is an important part of why listener’s struggle with contemporary classical music. Analyzing the compositions of 12 tone composers like Schoenberg and Webern, Huron found that their compositions were even more unpredictable to listeners than random pitches. This unpredictability results in confusion and listeners don’t get the enjoyment of successfully second-guessing where a composition is going.
While I’m not clear on how the following effects pattern recognition, one of the most interesting tidbits in Gray’s article has to do with recent research by Northwestern University’s Nina Kraus. Using brain scanning equipment, Kraus recorded the brain activity of both musicians and non-musicians while listening to music. She discovered that the brain activity very closely resembled the sound waves themselves and could be converted back into music.
Regardless, I think there is hope for the future audiences of contemporary classical music because enculturation also influences our abilities to recognize and anticipate musical patterns. With familiarization and understanding audiences can develop an understanding of contemporary classical’s musical “language” which translates into a better ability to predict the patterns and enjoy the music.
This fall I will again be teaching Music Appreciation, a survey course on mostly western art music for non-music majors. In past semesters teaching this class I’ve had students express similar ideas to Gray. Many students who took this class from me stated that at the beginning of the semester they found listening to pieces by Beethoven, for example, difficult because the musical language was too unfamiliar. By the end of the semester, (hopefully most of) the students had assimilated some of the sounds and developed the cognitive skills to anticipate such things as a cadence or recapitulation and some even claimed to learn to enjoy Schoenberg’s music.
With an understanding that pattern recognition is essential for, or at least strongly related to, understanding and enjoyment of music, can musicians and music educators use this to our advantage for developing new audiences for contemporary classical music?
