This morning, while tidying up the apartment, I realized that the two CDs sitting on top of my music collection were Schoenberg: The Piano Music and Alright, Still, the 2006 debut album by Lily Allen.
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I listen to both of these albums a lot, and suddenly it occurred to me that in a cultural sense there is something slightly odd about that. If you think of music, in its infinite variety, as a landscape, then Arnold Schoenberg and Lily Allen seem to represent two points on that landscape about as vastly far apart from one another as any two points could be.
And yet I love both of these albums, I play both quite often, and both give me enormous pleasure. What is going on here? Am I actually multiple people trapped in the same body? Is Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind” so literally true as all that?
I occurs to me, upon further reflection, that there is actually one principle that unites Allen and Schoenberg, as different as they might seem. Both are deeply engaged in an inquiry into the tension between pattern and chaos, and the pleasures that can be found therein. Schoenberg uses seemingly random collections of notes, and creates great beauty by arranging them into startling chromatic patterns, runs of seemingly random and dissonant chords that form lovely clusters of sonic texture and movement. He creates a sensation of order from the very stuff of chaos.
Allen, of course, works with a much narrower musical palette. Her musical idiom is jazz inflected ska, swinging and brash, pure unapologetic pop. But her breezy vocals capture our attention not for their bright and lovely lilt (and her singing is indeed lovely), but for the things she chooses to sing about. This is happy, snappy music about alienation, contempt, love gone wrong, small random cruelties, and the unfairness of existence. She succeeds by setting up an extreme aesthetic tension between the simple surface joy of pop music and the despair within the average human heart.
I wonder whether I love both of these albums for the same reason: Both operate by keeping their listener on the knife edge between the comfort of an ordered universe, and the chaos of the formless void that lurks just beyond. This tension appeals to something about the way our human sensibility is wired. When we find ourselves walking the precipice that lies between order and chaos, we feel most intensely alive.