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Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0
hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"
Application of the twelve-tone method appeared well into the 20th century. Mahler is "turn of the century", Romantic-era Schoenberg is "turn of the century", but twelve-tone music really gets its start two decades in.
Schoenberg turned to twelve-tone rows to impose discipline on his music after some years writing freely atonal music. He felt that what he was doing up to that point was "random-sounding music", while twelve-tone rows make it less arbitrary. I for one find great gestalt in twelve-tone music, even the 1950s Darmstadt bleep-bloop stuff. The only truly random-sounding music in the modern-classical world I've encountered is some Ferneyhough, but at least his scores offer some pleasure for reading.
It's funny that conservative music lovers think the Second Viennese School were hacks, yet they don't rage against the Japanese and Detroit noise music scenes, which arguably have a larger popular following and influence and are spreading widely. I've ever been to a couple of sold-out concerts in Beijing where it was just two hours of feedback. Compared to this stuff, Schoenberg's twelve-tone period might as well be late Romanticism.
A claim that the classical music world was somehow taken over by atonalists is just an urban myth. See Joseph N. Straus's famous article "The myth of serial 'tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s" in The Musical Times Vol. 83, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 301-343. He carefully examines the statistics and finds that not only was twelve-tone music not prevalent among music in concert halls (tonal composers like Britten and Copland consistently holding sway), but even in academic ivory towers only a minority of instructors were pushing twelve-tone music.
Consequently, the idea of minimalism coming in and saving the scene from itself just isn't how things were.