Thanks, Doug, for prodding the conversation back into gear. I have no fear of ideas, big or small, so long as they don't turn into orthodoxies - so long, that is, as we are able to recognize the variety within them. In the general retreat from modernism, we have done a lot of good music a great disservice by answering one orthodoxy with another. Modernism was (and is) not monolithic, and rejecting it as a bad idea makes no more sense than it did to insist that music needed to conform stylistically to be "relevant." In other words, there was an orthodoxy, but also many composers working in the margins. 

If critics are unwilling to wave the flag for a big idea it's partly because we still remember those distortions. Who wants to be remembered as the critic who ignored what was really going on because he (or she) was in thrall to a particular school? Like Alex, I want to be able to keep my ears alert to a wide variety of styles and respond to great music wherever it may come from. (And I'm delighted to add a couple of items to my must-hear list.)

Having said that, Doug, you're quite right that we needn't worry about being tyrannized by ideas, only by ideologies. Ideas can coexist, ideologies can't. So I would hope that by the end of the week we could get some clarity without being reductive. That's why I made my somewhat pedantic proposal yesterday, in the hope that we could at least begin to itemize some of the ideas that are in circulation and connect them to actual composers.

Greg: I take your point that formalism was not unique to modernism or music (and that not all composers were modernists), though I think the level of technical self absorption during the 50s was extraordinarily high. Bach's devices were all tied to a big extra-musical idea: glorifying God. Skipping ahead: Clement Greenberg was a Marxist, and for him paint on canvas was part of an explicitly political agenda. The abstract expressionists themselves were brimming with big ideas about spirituality, Jung, myth and the unconscious. Certainly for Pollock, technique was a means for highly personalized self expression.

You're quite right to point out that in the 50s, the big formalist idea was countered by the big anti-formalist idea of spontaneity. Which gets me back to what I was saying earlier: As critics we have to be able to hold opposites and contradictions in our heads at the same time. As to why formalism took hold in music so much more strongly than in other arts, I've always thought it was partly a defense mechanism. In the U.S., anyway, composers needed a university berth and had to give music some academic respectability, so they treated it as a field of research, endowing it with a level of technical intricacy that would make its secrets unavailable to non-specialists. Provosts and university presidents, accustomed to dealing with people whose fields they had no clear understanding of, were happy to accord composers the same esoteric respect. It's more complicated than that, of course, but I don't want to stray too far away from the present.

I won't argue with you about Philip Glass - that's an old prejudice of mine. Likewise with L'avventura.

Kyle -- I know some of your composers, often from decades past, and I'll dip into your links with pleasure (sounds vaguely icky, that). My gripe, and this is the last time I'll say it, is that there is SO MUCH MORE new music out there than just the composers to whom you have devoted your critical career. You're such a smart guy, so why not spread your wings? Starting with some of the composers Alex mentions (not that your're unfamiliar with those works, but why not make them part of your mission, too?), and going on to all the wider worlds of music spinning away out there in the sonic universe?

Doug and Alex -- I'm with you, Doug, on big ideas; music, especially for anyone who uses words to embrace it, is a constant dialogue between sound and thought, and not just thought about sound. Ideas don't dictate; they reflect and annoy and inspire. But they're important, from ideas about how a particular piece should work to the place of one's work in the larger spectrum of new music to politics and science and philosophy and religion. Sticking to indivdual composers and their works is of course vital, too. But not in an intellectual void, as Alex knows full well; he eptiomizes that kind of context in everything he writes. We need a constant grounding of intellectual conceits into the hard reality of actual compositions. But we need ideas to lift us out of sonic myopia.

Whether or not I qualify (as an ex-music critic) to contribute to this fascinating discussion, let me just make one comment: it is absolutely inconceivable that there could or should any longer be a ‘big idea’ or a prevailing musical mainstream. A century of recording and broadcasting, increasingly making all musics available to all, has completely changed our concept of musical tradition and influence in ways it is impossible to underestimate.

It is now generations since there has been a single idea or mainstream for any composer to react to or develop or fight against. Creative decisions today take place in an utterly different context from those in the past.

"The musical equivalent would have been a composer who, in a white heat of creation, spewed out music -- but writing it down, not improvising it in concert. (Of course, somebody's sure to point out some composer who did just this." - Greg Sandow

I'd like to be that somebody - Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892 - 1988) an enormously prolific composer, who completed more than one hundred works between 1915 and 1984.  read more

Quoth Rockwell: "But [ideas] are important, from ideas about how a particular piece should work to the place of one's work in the larger spectrum of new music to politics and science and philosophy and religion. Sticking to indivdual composers and their works is of course vital, too. But not in an intellectual void, as Alex knows full well." Point taken. I don't mean to act the Pure Fool here. It's just that insisting on the individuality of compositional voices is pretty close to the core of my philosophy as a critic, and is in itself an idea worth mentioning.

A new topic possibly worth touching on: Why exactly did 20th-century music seem to suffer in excess from dogmas and orthodoxies, polemicizing and politiciking? After all, all this same cogitation went on in other art forms. Clement Greenberg has been mentioned — a scary idea-bully if ever there was one. Yet abstract expressionism and other movements he championed had a powerful public impact, and the personality of each painter trumped the ideas attached. What went wrong in music? If, indeed, something went wrong — perhaps there are old-school modernists out there who wish to respond to the routine modernist-bashing that's gone on in my posts and others. My answer would have something to do with music's perennial envy of other forms — its self-image of being backward and parochial and slow. Wagner's writings rage eloquently on this topic. Yet musical history suggests that "big ideas" must arrive in the wake of, rather than in advance of, long-developing technical ideas, such as, say the interplay of monody and dissonance that led Monteverdi to proclaim the "seconda prattica." In the 20th century, composers started brainstorming big ideas without first working them out in practice. The result was an overebullient marketplace, to take a phrase from Alan Greenspan, tied to products no one really wanted or needed. That's what we're all wary of now.

When I look at music today, I think back to Berlin in the twenties — a period that uncannily resembles the one we're in now, with so many composers talking about breaking away from academic practice and engaging with pop music, new technological media, wider social trends. When I read Kyle's definitions of postminimalism — “the same weight and density as Middle Baroque music, like Corelli, but with non-functional harmony … the structural basis is rhythm, not harmony, …. tonal, mostly consonant (or at least never tensely dissonant), and usually based on a steady pulse)” — I immediately thought to myself, Hindemith! Although Kyle himself reminds me more of Hanns Eisler. (A compliment in my book.) The Weimar composers were grappling with the same intractable problem that consumes composers now — how do we operate in a rapid-fire capitalist-democratic marketplace that lusts for the hotness of pop? Do we try to throw ourselves into the thick of the melee, or do we bow out of it and cultivate our own garden? I'm all for the first possibility, but I'm aware of its dangers. Schoenberg once scowled that all these populists would end up speaking to a mass public consisting of each other, and, ya know, he was kinda right. Fianlly, needless to say, I hope to God this Weimar Republic analogy doesn't track too closely.

So, why do I limit myself to merely the 800 or 900 composers who make art rock, minimalism, sampling collages, just-intonation music, expanded equal-temperament music, plunderphonics, postminimalism, interactive computer music, classical/jazz fusions, wall-of-sound music, performance art, new musical instruments, MAX/MSP music, free improvisation, sound installations, sound sculpture, totalism, ambient music, mechanical instrument music, conceptual music, and process music? Why not be like other critics and limit myself to the 40 guys who get orchestra commissions? I dunno.... convenience, I guess.

When John Rockwell gripes that Kyle Gann has devoted his career to certain composers and suggests that he pick up on the composers Alex Ross mentions, he indirectly brings up a point regarding musical worlds and critical positions that needs further discussion. From my reading over decades, I find Gann to have a far more thorough social and historist sense of contemporary composer's careers and the specific trajectories of their music than John Rockwell... read more

Random aesthetic questions (wrapping a few assumptions) that I've been turning over ever since reading Leonard B. Meyers' "Music, The Arts and Ideas" many years ago: Which metaphorical direction do ideas have to be in to become "big"? "Up"? "Out"? Against"? We can call anything a work of art; what kind of attribute are we imbuing it with, that a moment before the same object wasn't given? read more

John Rockwell’s book meant something to me when I read it 20 years ago, as a music-poetry-theater obsessed college student for whom high-low distinctions had never existed, growing up in a bourgeois family where my mom and my grandma were equally enthralled by the classical music and the show tunes they played on piano.  I read about Ives and Varese in books on my parents’ shelf, took piano lessons, played punk rock, loved Ornette Coleman & Ellington & N. Young & L. Anderson & Art Ensemble & John Cage & Nancarrow & Mozart & J. Strauss & Sousa, and all of this was normal to my family and my friends (well, few friends dug Sousa or Strauss); Rockwell’s book confirmed my experience.  I tried to re-read it a few years ago & just couldn’t get into it.   read more

I'm apparently not alone in feeling that too much of this has degenerated into one-upsmanship and looking down noses. Let's have disagreement, fine, but the condescending tone of at least one contributor hardly illuminates anything except--well, we won't go there. No wonder readers don't like critics.

I wonder if Susan McClary wouldn't dub our whole "next big idea" a hopelessly patriarchal concept. I'm not prepared to follow her ideas all the way, but she's onto something important.

Raising gender and sexuality issues in music isn't next big idea, but it's not yet exhausted.

I agree with much of what John Shaw writes about how the ground has shifted since "All American Music" came out 21 years ago. Not sure it's shifted QUITE 180 degrees, but the point is certainly well taken. Sorry he (you) thought I was coasting in Seattle. For the record, I had prepared, but I've found that reading from notes makes for a more spontaneous talk than reading from a prepared text.

And I definitely agree with Scott's latest posting, about civility.  

Scott Cantrell wrote: "I'm apparently not alone in feeling that too much of this has degenerated into one-upsmanship and looking down noses. Let's have disagreement, fine, but the condescending tone of at least one contributor hardly illuminates anything except--well, we won't go there. No wonder readers don't like critics." And John Rockwell commented: "And I definitely agree with Scott's latest posting, about civility."

Interesting. That fraying of the edges of civility among the professionals here seemed to me a most welcome sign of critical good health, and the very thing that made this symposium's exchanges (among the professionals) so encouraging... read more

It seems to me that the sniping is a sign of frustration at how difficult it is to deal with the topic that Doug set for us. I wrote a column today about this blog and what struck me was how much of the discussion has been taken up by obsessive list making. One person offers Duckworth, another counters with Auerbach a third pipes up with Coates. I'm glad for all the tips, and I'm compiling a listening list of my own, but by scouring the corners of the Kitchen and exploring the Seattle avant-garde for ever more names, we may be missing the obvious. We're behaving like Albanians in a suburban mega-mall: Overwhelmed by choice and variety, we grab at what looks cool. Rather than select, we accumulate: We've developed the catalogue as critique.

I suspect, though, that despite this collective disorientation, most of us might agree that John Adams is one of the two or three most important, prolific and germane composers in the United States. His techniques are consistent, his trajectory clear, his style in constant evolution, his mastery unquestionable and he's certainly grappling with the issues of our time (Klinghoffer, anybody?). Can't we devote more than a passing reference to him? Looking for the current big thing, or the next one, without dealing with Adams seems perverse.

Few critics discover new talents. We do not, by and large, conduct the equivalent of artists' studio visits. Mostly we rely on presenters and performers to sift through the mountains of novelty and put their own reputations at the service of an unknown composer's. Often those people do a very good job. By the time a composer's work is being performed at Carnegie Hall or at Disney Hall, that person has likely put in some time in lofts and basements. Bulletin: Uptown and downtown have merged. It was John Rockwell, after all, who set the tone for Lincoln Center Festival, which has devoted multi-part tributes to Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Ornette Coleman and Elvis Costello. Carnegie Hall recently commissioned pieces from Lisa Bielawa and Michael Gordon.

So we might do well - here and in the "Music Since 1990" database that Doug set up - to wonder whether the best place to search for the zeitgeist is in the margins of an already marginal art.