originality than musical problem solving. A musical problem is “How
do I develop this material well?” not “How do I develop it in a way in
which it has never been developed before?” Stylistic change occurs
when there is either a change in the underlying forces which provide
composers with their musical problems—the rise of a paying concert
public in the eighteenth century, say—or when the exploration of musi-
cal ideas based on these forces throws up new musical possibilities. A
musical style is rather like a mineral deposit that is never exhausted, but
which might become uneconomic, depending on the discovery of new
deposits which are easier to mine, or new modes of production which
favour other minerals, or new patterns of demand.
We might also use the distinction between solving musical and non-
musical problems to explain what makes a musical device into a cliché,
or what makes it banal.^15 It does not matter how familiar or well-used a
musical idea is. It rings true if a composer turns to it as a solution to a
distinct musical problem. It is only if he borrows it wholesale, together
with its problem that it becomes a cliché. If a composer wants merely to
be “dramatic” and so automatically writes a diminished seventh chord,
then he is using a cliché. But if he has a more specific and distinct musi-
cal problem in which he’s involved, as with Schubert and his detailed
working of a Lied, then it will be different.
We might also observe that implicit in Popper’s account of the source
of musical problems is a critique of the idea of compositional freedom.
Composers are never free from some set of givens—partly musical,
partly social—which influence what they write. And neither should they
aspire to be, because these influences present the very problems, the
solution to which is at the heart of creativity. The Romantic bid for free-
dom from constraint in favor of self-expression is an error, and this has
implications for the view that certain types of restrictions on musicians
are invariably pernicious.
This has implications for restrictions on musicians which are some-
times seen as pernicious. The complaint that art is incompatible with
commerce, for instance, that commercial pressures are too restrictive on
artistic freedom, sits unhappily beside this Popperian view. In the eigh-
teenth century, the rise of commercial music in the form of the sub-
scription concert encouraged both the development of concert halls, and
the writing of “dramatic” orchestral music to fill them, which was an
important component in the evolution of Mozartian classical style. In
that case, commercial dogma performed well, which is as much as can
be said for it. The rise of university-based composition and the tendency
to regard composition as a form of research might present another
What Shall We Do After Wagner? 107