On the economy of materials in music

The economy of materials is a subject of great importance in the history of Western Music, though it hasn't been widely talked about in concrete, explicit terms.

The ear is naturally drawn to repetition, be it literal, symbolic or abstracted. Economy of materials implies in a necessary way some higher degree of repetition and vice versa. Thus, composers are naturally drawn to some economy of material. This is a purely phenomenological observation —not a claim about absolute hierarchies of æsthetic value.

Pairing, in the same piece, a highly economical handling of materials and certain æsthetic/stylistic conventions can become a task of remarkable technical difficulty. This is how the ability to produce a piece with notable economy of material became associated with the recognition of technical ability (a most noteworthy example is the pedagogical status of the Fugue, think about the Prix de Rome).

In Western Music, the Germanic tradition became somewhat tied with the economy of materials. This is specially exemplified in the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and countless others. The æsthetic philosophy of Arnold Schönberg also valued economy of materials, and gave rise to the extremely formalist serial æsthetic (that culminates in the pathology of exhaustivity found in some of Boulez's pieces).

There is nothing ontological in a piece of music needing to be economical or materially "coherent" in any way. But, much like there is an expectation of a piece of music being, in some sense, a round form, a form that closes itself, there is an expectation of economy, of recognisability, of repetition. This idea has some Platonist undertones: the piece has to be an independent, pure object with a coherent meaning, structure and teleology.

The idea of what is the appropriate degree of economic handling of musical materials has been controversial. Famously, Debussy

believed that Beethoven had terrifically profound things to say, but that he did not know how to say them, because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness.^[1]

The view implicit in the quote is the critique of the material, motivic economy of Beethoven was taking place of the economy of some "semantic economy". This exemplifies one of the dividing principles of the Germanic and Parisian æsthetic archetypes, the central quid of it being the explicit versus the implicit. Both might be thought of as archetypal poles, the Germanic bringing the truth through form and the Parisian protecting truth from form.

Economy —much like teleology— is a stylistic/æsthetic choice. However, this doesn't mean that it is completely arbitrary, and the phenomenological origins of the concept of economy have to be taken into consideration when making the pertinent æsthetic and stylistic decisions.