Hugo Riemann, Duality and Fear

There’s a system of harmonic movement created in the 19th century by musicologist Hugo Riemann that he referred to as “dualist”. Riemannian Theory is a series of simple movements between triads that eventually cycles completely, forming a closed geometric phenomenon called a tonnetz. The duality he referred to is the concept of major triads and minor triads being the same in different inversions. It’s a simple enough concept, and he’s right of course. But the important part (to me) is in the naming of the thing. Referring to it as a duality rather than some theoretical term that would inevitably weaken the concept forces the student or composer to think in tonality and more abstract terms.

It’s an odd duality. On the one side, the movement and resulting pattern of riemannian harmony is a neat, closed loop. The kind of thing humans live for. Sacred geometry, math materialized from thin air. Actual, real life magic. The other side of that asks you to deny that pleasure and engage in your emotion. Patterns are easy, feelings are complicated.

The primary action in anything related to the creation of sound is listening. You cannot articulate anything clearly if you cannot listen. An ableist trope, no doubt. This, then, becomes a question of objectivity. Patterns are objective. While emotional responses maybe should be objective in cases of extreme injustice, emotion is inherently subjective.

This creates an interesting duality that, to me at least, remains pervasive throughout the culture of music. Patterned vs impulsive, deliberate vs open. Technique vs heart, recreation vs exploration. There’s an inherent elitism at this level, largely because there’s an unwillingness to embrace a duality that’s developed throughout our cultures in the 21st century. It’s truly an us versus them mentality that has totally reshaped the way everyone processes their interactions, transactions, protests, subversions, support and judgement.

The political climate of the 21st century, or at least since 9/11, is extreme dualism in nearly every western conflict. The west has chosen to demonize practitioners of Islam, and Arabs in general, to such a degree that it would be perceived as “dangerous” to show any empathy for an entire ethnicity en masse. This serves the US specifically in so many obvious ways, and I’m in no position to be writing about policy with any kind of authority. I am, however, a lifetime observer of culture war.

In my observation, this is where duality has become totally misunderstood. Dualisms should really be an opportunity to see multitudes in what are typically complex situations. In their current states, however, they serve only to assign the outlines of belief to opposite warring sides. It’s almost as if by having more than one obvious position, a concept demands conflict above all else. Opportunities reduced to content.

People also seem to increasingly view their social positioning as at direct odds with their counterparts on the other side of the duality. Left vs right, technique vs heart. Maybe this is nature. Humans are pattern seeking creatures, and a pattern of thought must have its counterpoint in order to exist at all. The dangerous part is the ever growing distance between the sides. Most social schisms should invite collaborative ideas, not sow division. But when the world powers have taken the gloves off and simultaneously removed the veil on their dedication to endless war profiteering, the social model naturally creeps towards violence.

There is no collaboration. In fact, there is no cross contamination. If one side believes this, the other believes the opposite because fuck them. Entertaining an opposing view point can be seen as treachery, even when it is the prudent thing to do (which it almost always is). Naomi Klein has written about this more thoroughly and thoughtfully than I ever could in her book Doppelgänger. The concept of a double is pervasive when you begin to think about division and its current avatars today.

I won’t try to speak for others, but for me music has always been the escape from that. The reality is, schisms that are really dualities are everywhere in music. Look at the hyper specific genre-fication of Spotify. An organization openly committed to devaluing the listening experience, distancing artists from their fans, and going to previously unimaginable lengths to not pay the artists that bring them billions annually. Your lofi bedroom dream pop record used a digital tape emulator instead of actual tape, therefore it is actually lofi synthgaze. Case dismissed. Gate kept.

This of course only illustrates the maybe more pervasive devaluation of art into content. Art is not valued as a whole at this stage. It is nearly impossible to make a living wage as an artist without a side hustle, or preexisting wealth. It’s hard to imagine anything bridging the existing gaps between creative and ideological dualisms as long as creativity is only a privilege allowed at least in part relative to your commitment and success in the capitalist model of branding.

Discussing capitalism is remarkably similar to discussing western music theory. For a majority of musicians who have come up in the industrial music school complex, there are clearly defined rules. The great irony of the vast majority of these “rules” is that they came from either wild eyed experimentalism or ancient folk traditions. As with every institution in the west, western musicology aims to put the history of music that it has determined worthy on a nice clean linear west-centric family tree. This begat that begat the other thing.

The elitism that arises from this arbitrary model of importance is multifaceted in its ability to diminish, restrict, and discredit the contributions of individuals that don’t happen to be white men. Western thought is inherently supremacist, and institutionalized learning is the indoctrinating arm of a supremacist regime. If you idolize the propaganda machine enough for long enough, people will be honored to accept the indoctrination. They’ll go into massive amounts of debt to pursue a career that will almost certainly not allow those debts to be paid.

It’s worth considering the majority of private institutions of higher learning in the US were all funded by extremely rich colonialist men who had a very specific charter they wanted to “pass on” indefinitely. These schools are by definition institutions of indoctrination, not learning. Of course those charters can and have changed over time, but the fact remains that as the viewpoints on race, ethnicity, and cultural contributions from outside the west or from the marginalized communities inside of it. These institutions have ultimately played gatekeeper to cultural knowledge on a level that’s hard to fathom.

We’ve all heard the anecdotes of one off classes being taught at Harvard on Lil Kim or Taylor Swift. These are at best patronizing, and at worst a thinly veiled continuation of the very gate keeping that helped establish an iron clad reputation of Ivy League elitism. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be classes on Lil Kim, or any number of cultural figures. It more just further illustrates the willingness or desire of the institution to bless a member of the “less-than” with their heavy nod. A symbolic welcome into what surely feels like a secret society.

These dynamics seem to leave artists in a perpetual state of fear. But isn’t fear the ultimate duality? Worrying about what could possibly lurk on the other side? Fear couldn’t exist without reason. Sure, one can be naturally anxious or sensitive to tension. But as an artist, the fear is foundational.

Art is truly a perpetual act of learning to fail, over and over again. The artist that gives themselves to whatever craft by nature exposes themselves more thoroughly than others by choice. It’s narcissism and erotic humiliation in equal measure. So why does the fear persist if it’s so enjoyable?

Pythagoras is widely attributed with figuring out the harmonic series while walking in a market and hearing two anvils ringing at exactly an octave apart. This is likely untrue, as the system of tuning we call Pythagorean now had already been around for a long time. There is a similar system in China that predates it, as well. Pythagoras was also a cult leader, and an early practitioner of communism. In the way that a religious cult led by the supposed deity himself and cut off from communication to the outside world so as to rely completely on itself is communism. Either way, the discovery of a system of math that was physically represented in the universe was incomprehensible at the time. Some people would go so far as to say that discovery was the birth of what we now call science. Pythagoras called it “natural philosophy”, because he was trying to understand the natural world above all else. Music, of course, existed before this and would have continued to exist without it. But this does mark the beginning of a quantifiable measurement of something objective. Sound is not necessarily objective, but music is. Was there an immediate elitism that developed from the holders of these new magic ratios? Or were they simply witches, out to destroy the wonder of the natural world by explaining it ? Probably somewhere in between.

Is the fear we feel as artists just a trauma response to the slow but relentless devaluing of arts under capitalism? There probably was a time when art was central to life, and was treated with the respect it should be. It’s difficult to imagine a society such as ours valuing a practice that seeks to find order in the natural world, when the primary objective of said society is destroying that world. Neoliberalism has dangled the proverbial art carrot since its inception, awarding presidential medals of freedom and knighthood to artists that are almost always equally successful in their careers as capitalists and corporatists. What an embarrassing spectacle. To have a medal draped across your chest by a war criminal while they pat you on the head and say “how nice”.

The fact that there is even the illusion of interest in arts from the public should tell you exactly how important creative expression really is. Our commitment to capitalism is so complete, that there is no rational explanation for artists to exist. They would be far more effective as workers, putting their skills to use in advertising, or even as a harrowing tale of refusal. The reality is, the human spirit is real. Connection is real, love is real, consciousness is real, desire is real and the need to understand where you fit in between all of it is indeed real. Conversely, another reality is that the arts are so marginalized within late capitalism that the mouthpieces don’t even need to address it. They don’t care because they don’t need to. They can spend a trillion dollars on bombs that kill children, then a thousand on one regional arts program and feel that they have cleared any conscious they may have.

So this is where the fear lives. The commitment one makes to a practice that is not only under-appreciated, under funded, under represented but also lacks any kind of tangible objectivity is an obvious secession to loss. But only if you care about winning. Art is an act of performed vulnerability, and the world has the capacity to be profoundly harsh. So then art is an act of protest. A practice of forcing a duality.

Riemannian harmony consists of three stepwise movements - relative, parallel, and leading tone movement. All are simple, diatonic step wise movements of a single voice within a triad. These small changes over the various possible cycles lead to dramatic changes in harmony, one step at a time. While there are harmonic equivalents of Milton Friedman’s inhumane and decidedly criminal approach of economic shock treatment, and even Mark Fisher’s resigned Realism - movements of sound meant evoke thought and torment - these are rarely sustainable and even less often musical. There are too many potential metaphors to digest here, so we can just pick a couple at random.

Riemann described a musical environment in which the small actions of each part over the course of a planned movement result in significant changes. Music is not objective, but sound is. Sound is measurable, and the sounds that fit well together are mathematic matches. Our ears soften to diatonicism because there is a rational order to the sound. We are pattern and order seeking creatures, so it’s only natural that some of us would be so dedicated to the sanctity of these universal ratios. But order needs chaos as much as the I needs the V. Tension and release, minor major, fear and comfort. Music is a metaphysical manifestation of the dualities that connect everything; a universal consciousness that can be observed. Whether we choose to engage with this by rigorously upholding the laws we know to be true, or we seek a stepwise movement toward something new - music is the healing force of the universe.

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tior