Why modern art is easier to 'get' than experimental music

Philip Ball in Prospect:

One difference between the avant-garde in classical music and in visual art, however, is that late 20th-century music was apt to defy these organising principles, while visual art did not. Although some viewers may fret that they cannot understand what is in front of them, it takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper. The fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on, even if we come up with nothing more than a vague sense of beauty, serenity or absurdity. Music can defy even this basic sort of cognitive parsing: it can refute our efforts to find coherence, rather as if a video artist were to present us with unstructured static. Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained—but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.

Many musicologists accept a definition of music as “organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present. And there are some universal principles that come into play in differentiating music from mere noise. For example, melodies that move in small steps tend to sound unified and “good,” while ones with large and frequent jumps between high and low notes are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones often confuse us. Tonality creates a hierarchy of pitch and a sense of “place” in the musical scale. But it’s not just tonal music that uses these cognitive aids: they are found in other musical traditions the world over.

The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce—enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the melody line, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, it is hard to develop any expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect.

The rest here.