- Why Popper?
There is never a shortage of critics of the avant-garde, almost by defini-
tion. However, most theoretical or historical accounts of it tend to be
either tacitly or explicitly supportive of the developments they describe.
This is unsurprising, for theorists and historians generally and rightly
study what interests and enthuses them. Moreover, since the job of his-
torians and theorists is largely to explain history’s successes (that is,
developments that endure or have an enduring legacy), it is always
tempting to write history as though one is describing or seeking an
explanation for what was in some way bound to happen, or was at least
a natural course of events.
Thus theoretical or historical literature on the musical avant-garde
(typified by, say, the Schoenberg school in the pre-war period, and the
Darmstadt modernists of the 1950s) tends to explain it in terms of one
or both of a necessary response to changing social conditions, or the log-
ical outcome of a chain of technical (purely musical) developments. For
instance, a conventional musicological view of atonality and serialism is
to see them as the outcome of the expanding harmonic vocabulary of
nineteenth-century composers such as Richard Wagner, which meant
that further harmonic development in the art required a fully chromatic
vocabulary which abandoned key relations altogether (atonality) and
ultimately a new formal principle to organize it (serialism). Social his-
tory on the other hand typically emphasizes influences such as urban
lifestyle, psychoanalytical concepts or economic alienation on the mind-
set of composers (and indeed, artists in all fields, social history being
intrinsically more cross-disciplinary than technical history) to account
for the same phenomena.^1 In both cases the drift of the exposition will
be that such developments were the natural, logical, and possibly
inevitable outcomes of their historical situation.
97[ 5 ]
What Shall We Do
After Wagner? Karl Popper on
Progressivism in Music
JONATHAN LECOCQ