What's a 'goal-oriented harmonic narrative' in music?
Source: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (1 ed. 2007; but 2008 Reprint ed. exists). p. 483 Middle.
??Although Cage avoided tonality and repetition in his music from
1950 onward, he hovered over the radical end of American music as
a liberating spirit. He had done the preliminary work of dismantling
the European "vogue of profundity," as he called it. In 1952, he scan-
dalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven
had misled generations of composers by structuring music in [1.] goal-oriented harmonic narratives [End of 1.] instead of letting it unfold moment by
moment. At a New York gathering, he was heard to say, "Beethoven
was wrong!" The poet John Ashbery overheard the remark, and for
years afterward wondered what Cage had meant. Eventually, Ashbery
approached Cage again. "I once heard you say something about
Beethoven," the poet began, "and I've always wondered—" Cage's
eyes lit up. "Beethoven was wrong!" he exclaimed. "Beethoven was
wrong!" And he walked away.
What does 1 mean? The bolded appears too terse and vague to me.
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I'm not sure, but I think Cage meant that Beethoven set up expectations on what would come later in a composition and then eventually satisfied such expectations. Personally, I think Beethoven (like most great composers and writers) set up possibilities of what would come later; then his actual "completion" of the expectation would sound like it was inevitable. The big names (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Handle, Liszt...) then to compose so that one only perceives the complete structure after the piece is over. I think Cage preferred another esthetic perspective.
As far as I can tell, a goal-oriented harmonic narrative is one that sets up the expectation of a home key, a departure from it, and often (but not always!) a need to go back.
For example, I think the average sonata-allegro is a goal-oriented harmonic narrative:
Exposition: Home key-dominant/relative major
Development: Do things, eventually end up in the V chord of the home key
Recapitulation: Home key-home key/tonic major
Marches have weaker goal-oriented harmonic narratives, but they're still plenty strong enough to reveal themselves, IMO. The "Florentiner March" has a home key-subdominant harmonic narrative and ends in the subdominant key, but one of the lead-ups in the subdominant section revolves around the subdominant's V chord and is incredibly powerful.
You can even argue that Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" has a goal-oriented harmonic narrative--the verses are in E minor, the choruses are in G major (the relative major), and the music eventually truck-driver's-gear-changes to B flat major and fades away from there.
Since it's Cage I assume he means it's too structured. Beethoven's pieces have clear narrative structures: beginning, middle and end. And also the smaller sections and harmonies are pretty vectorial, i.e. there's a clear direction where they're going musically, but also evocatively. It's all quite rigidly built. Everything fits together "perfectly" and if you were to leave something out the pieces crumble. It's like a really well crafted house where every nut and bolt has a specific intention and function.
Cage on the other hand was punk avant la lettre: he wanted to break free from the classical constraints on structure, melody and harmony. He believed in chaos and spontaneity. In his view music is something that arises, not necessarily from a strictly directed sequence of sounds. It can also be found in the (pseudo-) randomness of nature or even traffic.
In the house analogy he'd go for a tree house, bound together with rope and duct tape.
Since Beethoven is a very influential composer he set the tone for many generations after him: composers trying to do the same as he did, creating rigid and strictly structured music. I think Cage's take was that this was detrimental to musical history, i.e. too many composers walked in line and followed Beethoven's well structured example.
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