those who heard him, and had be been more widely heard (perhaps if he
had lived longer) he would have been more widely appreciated.
Popper’s second argument against avant-gardism is more interesting,
namely that its values of originality and progressiveness are different
from the values of artists as artists—values which have to do with solv-
ing the objective problems of a work, with perfecting it, and with making
it effective. Consequently, they are likely to be a distraction from artistic
values, perhaps even get in the way of them. Originality is a lucky gift
that is incidental, not essential, to art, and is not an appropriate goal for
a composer. Some of the most admired composers, like a Mozart or a J.S.
Bach, were not particularly innovative. This is a position that, at face
value at least, differs markedly from that of musical modernists.^7
We can understand these arguments more fully if we place them (as
Popper does in Unended Quest) alongside two other related theories that
the young Popper formed about music. One of these is to make a fairly
commonplace distinction between composition as self-expression on the
one hand, and objective working out of purely musical ideas or problems
on the other.^8 Whilst these represent two genuine attitudes towards music,
exemplified by Beethoven and Bach respectively, the former rests on a
mistake, for whilst music can represent emotions and perhaps stimulate
an emotional response, that does not in itself make it expressive except in
the most trivial sense that anything can be seen as the expression of what-
ever gives rise to it. In Popper’s view, Beethoven’s unique genius made a
success of the error of self-expression against the odds, but it is an atti-
tude likely to lead lesser composers astray, and this seems to have been
the fate of Wagner and those who sought to supersede him.
Popper’s other theory concerns the mechanism by which art and
music evolve, and is addressed particularly to the evolution of harmony
and counterpoint, and the question of why this should have developed in
Western Europe rather than elsewhere. Whilst this might appear to take
us rather far off the point, it is essential to understanding Popper’s point
of view as a whole.
Popper suggests that Western harmony evolved in response to the
dogmatic strictures of plainchant in the Roman church. This single-
voiced plainchant acted as a scaffolding on which composers gradually
learned to hang independent voices, perhaps through a process of trial
and error. So Popper conjectures that:
it was the canonization of Church melodies, the dogmatic restrictions on
them, which produced the cantus firmus against which the counterpoint
could develop. It was the established cantus firmus which provided theWhat Shall We Do After Wagner? 101