framework, the order, the regularity that made possible inventive freedom
without chaos. (Unended Quest, 58)Out of this he draws the more general conclusion that:musical and scientific creation seem to have this much in common: the use
of dogma, or myth, as a man-made path along which we move into the
unknown, exploring the world, both creating regularities or rules and prob-
ing for existing regularities.... Indeed, a great work of music (like a great
scientific theory) is a cosmos imposed upon chaos—in its tensions and har-
monies inexhaustible even for its creator. (58–59)Popper here offers a view of musical evolution that is obviously related
to his scientific methodology of conjecture and refutation. Theory
comes first (that is, it precedes observation and testing) in art as in sci-
ence. But in art (or at least in counterpoint) it takes the form of tradi-
tional practices. In art, these may look like restrictions, but they are
fruitful restrictions—a means to the growth of ideas—and the character
of this growth is problem-solving and testing by a process of trial and
error.
Quite what is the range of things that can count as a productive musi-
cal “dogma” for Popper is not clear. His example of canonized plain-
chant—that is, plainchant that was regularized and officially sanctioned
as church doctrine around the ninth century—suggests a musical prac-
tice related to social conditions: in this case the need for the church to
consolidate its authority. But in any event, from the composer’s point of
view the origin of the tradition in which, and in some respects against
which, he works is probably as irrelevant as the origins of a hypothesis
are to a scientist engaged in testing and revising it. The important thing
is that it provides him with musical problems to solve.
This emphasis on the role of dogma and tradition as supplying use-
ful problems for artists finds a parallel in Popper’s later writings about
the social sciences, where it is combined with skepticism about revolu-
tionary social change which could equally well be applied to the arts.
Thus in 1948 he observed that:the creation of traditions plays a role similar to that of theories... bringing
some order and predictability into the social world in which we live...
[and] giving us something upon which we can operate; something that we
can criticize and change.... But too many social reformers have an idea
that they would like to clean the canvas, as Plato called it, of the social
world, wiping off everything and starting from scratch with a brand-new102 Jonathan Le Cocq