rational world. This idea is nonsense and impossible to realize. If you con-
struct a rational world afresh there is no reason to believe that it will be a
happy world. There is no reason to believe that the blue-printed world will be
any better than the world in which we live. Why should it be any better? An
engineer does not create a motor-engine just from the blue-prints. He devel-
ops it from earlier models; he changes it; he alters it over and over again. If
we wipe out the social world in which we live, wipe out its traditions and cre-
ate a new world on the basis of blue-prints, then we shall very soon have to
alter the new world, making little changes and adjustments. But if we are to
make these little changes and adjustments, which will be needed in any case,
why not start them here and now in the social world we have?^9On the basis of the above, we might summarize a Popperian view of
music as follows, with only minimal extrapolation from his actual writ-
ings. The proper business of a composer is solving objective musical
problems. Other goals, such as originality or self-expression, are as irrel-
evant in music as they should be in science. Musical problems arise from
a set of givens—myth, strictures, dogma, or tradition—which are valu-
able precisely because of the restrictions and opportunities they supply.
Avant-gardism or progressivism in music errs in concerning itself with
non-musical problems such as originality or self-expression (and by
extension, we might add, to the expression of social forces in the case of
artists who seek to be “relevant”). Whilst they might be radical, the rad-
icalism of the avant-garde does not stem from the appropriately critical
attitude of problem-solving, and for that reason avant-gardes acquire the
character of clique or faction. The outcome of this distraction from gen-
uine artistic values was a decline in art in the twentieth century.
- Some Observations on Popper
So much for Popper’s direct comments on music. In the remainder of
this paper I would like to elaborate on some aspects of Popper’s account,
noting some possible problems, implications, and applications.
Immediate questions that come to mind are: how accurate was
Popper’s account of the Viennese avant-garde; and is there really a gulf
between the objective attitude to music which Popper advocates, and
that of Schoenberg and his contemporaries and successors? It is, for
instance, hard to know what to make of his comment that there was “not
much music” in Webern’s works (assuming he meant something more
than to say that they are relatively short and sparing of notes) given the
tight technical organization that made them such an agreeable model for
the post-1945 generation of formalist modernists. Moreover, to judge by
What Shall We Do After Wagner? 103