Critical Conversation
Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music
A 10-Day AJ Topic Blog (July
28-August 7, 2004)
Saturday, July 31
READER: Two Important Threads
By
Jonathan Gresl
posted @ 07/31/2004 6:01 pm
I see two important threads of importance which haven't really been elucidated. One is the actual composer and his/her composing, and new ideas therein. The other is the presentation of new (and old) music to the public, and the currentmusic marketplace, i.e. recording contracts, new music ensembles etc... read more
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READER: Why is it "Classical?"
By
Sophia Loke
posted @ 07/31/2004 6:00 pm
A question that has always been somewhere at the back of my mind just popped in: Why is it that we refer to classical music today as 'CLASSICAL' music in the first place?... read more
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To Justin: Hermetic music
By
Greg Sandow
posted @ 07/31/2004 4:47 pm
This is for Justin, though the way this blog moves, I feel I'm answering something from three years ago, not three days.
Thanks, Justin for your thought about hermetic music -- that
the big idea about music in the 1950s was that music was supposed to be about music. As much as avant-garde film lost itself in the narcotic charms of this camera angle or that excruciating silence, it still couldn't help being about the same things that have always concerned consumers of art: emotions, money, sex, power, self-regard. And no matter how much writers delighted themselves with the abstract ring, the rhythm - okay, the musicality - of language, they were still, at bottom telling stories and describing the world around them.
But by then composers, even the best composers - especially the best composers - had wandered so deep into the forests of technique, sound, structure and effect that the music they wrote was completely hermetic. I don't mean that it was incomprehensible, only that it was purely about itself.
I think, Justin, that you've nailed something very important here. I might quibble that what you say is true of "composers," implying all or most or the most important of them, because the '50s were full of people writing in perfectly non-hermetic styles. Talk to Ned Rorem, or Carlisle Floyd, or Barber, or Menotti, or Leonard Bernstein about writing music "purely about itself."
And then there was Cage, whose music was transcendently about something other than itself. But I do take your point -- a lot of the most notable, new, and above all prestigious music of that time appeared to be largely about itself.
But why was that? And why did people back then -- and us now -- accept this development as something valid, important, good, or even reasonable? Especially when, as you note, it didn't happen in the other arts.
Three quick observations:
1. No composer ever cared more about hermetic -- though really a better word would be "formalist" -- compositional devices than Bach. And yet his music isn't hermetic. He wrote lots of it for everyday use (in church, especially). And, maybe even more important, a lot of it (like much Baroque music, if not most of it) takes off from popular dance rhythms of its time, which means that, in ways we can barely imagine now, the very sound of it connected with everyday life.
2. The musical developments you talk about were part of a more global Big Idea, one that moved through many arts. In literature, the New Criticism was dominant, treating literary works as, in effect, simply words on paper, texts that could be studied on their own without reference to anything outside them. In visual art, there was Clement Greenberg's influential dictum that paintings were, essentially, nothing but paint on canvas. And yet neither painting nor literature got hermetic. The abstract expressionists, who were living examples of Greenberg's point (if not the inspiration for it), were adventurous, far more accessible than modernist music, and, eventually, quite popular.
3. There was another Big Idea sweeping through the arts in the '50s, in many ways the opposite of anything hermetic or formalist, though in painting it could overlap with formalism. It was the idea of improvisation -- Jackson Pollock dripping and spattering paint without premeditation, very much as a physical act; Jack Kerouac writing On the Road in just three weeks, typing it on a roll of paper, so he wouldn't have to stop to change pages. Not to mention jazz, which was exploding with bebop, and can serve as a link between Kerouac and Pollock, since it served as a constant soundtrack for both of them. But where was this in music? It certainly never entered the mainstream, unless you want to count Gunther Schuller's "third stream" music, which was supposed somehow to unite classical and jazz, and never went anywhere. Maybe the most important musical figure who might exemplify this Idea was Cage, though he went about it in quite a different, less explosive, far less personally expressive way (which sort of robs it of its point, at least from the Beat or Pollock point of view). And Cage certainly never rocketed to fame with a rave review in The New York Times, as Kerouac did.
So why did classical music become so much more formalist than other arts, and why did it resist this improvisatory wind? Of course, music, taken as a whole, didn't resist. There was jazz, and also rock & roll. (It's fascinating how many of the seminal '50s rock classics were improvised, or at least arose very suddenly, jumping to attention in the middle of recording sessions originally devoted to something else -- Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," Elvis's "That's All Right," Chuck Berry's "Maybelline." Even the Penguins' "Earth Angel," not revolutionary, however wonderful it might be as a doowop song was in one way a surprise, because the version released on record was originally meant just as a demo. It took a smart record guy to realize that it was perfect as it stood.)
This is the crucial question, one that, if we'd answer it, would help us understand why we got where we are today.
A couple of caveats, by the way. Justin, when you say that movies and literature just somehow can't resist telling stories, I'm not sure what that tells me. Isn't this the very question we're asking -- why some kinds of music became so strongly formalist, when other arts didn't? I'm not sure it helps to say that the other arts, gosh darn it, just can't help relating to the outside world. Besides, you might underestimate just how hermetic filmmakers like Antonioni and Godard seemed in their time. L'avventura was memorably derided, when it was first released, by the Times's movie critic of the time, Bosley Crowther. He couldn't see much sense or coherence in it at all. (Then, when the film world proclaimed L'avventura a masterpiece -- I remember one list of great films that ranked it second, right after Citizen Kane -- Crowther lost his nerve and, as I seem to remember, never trusted his judgment of the avant-garde again. I hope I remember this right! It happened a long time ago, but I remember making fun of Crowther's turnaround with my best friend in high school.)
And as for Philip Glass's music not being about anything -- well, I'm not sure how the real stuff of music is ever really about anything. But that doesn't stop it from making connections with the outside world, and Philip's music made those connections bigtime when it first appeared. Many people remarked, for instance, on what seemed then like the obvious connection between minimalism and rock. Thus it didn't seem surprising that Glass's music got popular; it seemed to echo in the zeitgeist, if that's not a badly mixed metaphor. Plus it resonated with minimal art, which was then ('70s, early '80s) a central trend.
But in a much more basic way, something about Philip's music seemed to pick up something in the air. Many people sensed that. John Rockwell described how that felt, and did it really memorably, in his book All American Music. I myself couldn't reread that chapter, or remember living through the things it describes, and say that Philip's music is only about itself. It sure didn't seem so then.
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Friday, July 30
READER: A Still More Disturbing Question
By
Brian Newhouse
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:28 pm
"No composer, at least anytime recently, has entered the public consciousness with anything like the breadth of Ms. Morrison." For that matter, how many pop musicians have entered the public consciousness with anything like the breadth of Ms. Morrison? Worse
yet... read more
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Queries for John Rockwell
By
Kyle Gann
posted @ 07/30/2004 4:18 pm
I worry sometimes that the composers Kyle champions are those left over from the 70's who haven't "made it," making it being not topping the charts but winning the respect of fellow composers and fellow artists and enough critics to earn a place in the broader conversation. - Rockwell
But why would you assume that, John? Wouldn't it be worth finding out? I'm talking mostly about people who graduated college between '75 and '83, so calling them "left over from the '70s" is a little harsh. Might'nt one have said the same thing about Morton Feldman in 1974, when he was the same age I am now, and when he hadn't yet written any of his really great music except Rothko Chapel? Or Conlon Nancarrow in 1960, aged 48, when he had done nothing but write 30 player piano studies of whose existence the world was completely unaware? Or Robert Ashley in 1978, just starting work on Perfect Lives? What's the cutoff age?
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Jotting IV: Grab bag
By
Charles Ward
posted @ 07/30/2004 3:55 pm
Before I find all my ideas appearing in other posts, here are some:
* The performer skilled in multiple media (already partially raised). String players who are facile in going between period and modern instruments. Singers who move from classical to other styles (the Renee Flemings who don't get trapped in the clutches of the music industry -- oh for the days she would show up at an interview looking less than perfect). At Rice University a handful of professors have acquired a group of restored 19th-century pianos and are using the full range, including a pristine 1825 Graf and a 1890 Bluthner, for performance and teaching.
* Musically illiterate but gifted performers. In a non-snooty moment, I wrote a story last year on the music program at Lakewood Church, a non-denominational charismatic Houston congregation that is the largest meg-church in the country (no, I'm not indulging in old stereotypes about Texas). The music is part of the reason. The lead female worship could be a star in the secular world and on a couple of tracks on their CDs, the choir sings with a precision I never hear from the Houston Symphony Chorus. But most of the singers, including the leader, can't read music.
* ``Creative destruction,'' the phrase popular in the business worlds that came from from ``Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy'' by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Competition in the future will be based not on price but on ``the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization ... -- competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage.''
* Outsourcing (already alluded to by Greg). With his Naxos label, Klaus Heymann totally upset the economics and aesthetics of the classical recording industry. He outsourced: Hiring unknown performers and obscure East European orchestras to build cities. Cities have outsourced work to conductors and soloists for ever. Now, as Greg suggested, the time is coming when even major cities likes San Antonio may outsource their performing arts (and what an issue that will pose in contract negotiations!)
* The need to communicate with audiences -- the ``Little Women'' syndrome. After seeing the audience reception of Daniel Catan's "Florencia en el Amazonas" and the success of Adamo's "Little Women," Houston Grand Opera general director David Gockley made a conscious decision to seek out scores he thinks will have a chance to get played again. No one "A Quiet Place" or "New Year."
* Could Gockley's decision represent the faint stirrings of a reaction to the dominance of music that people don't like to listen to?
* Is the stasis we're now seeing in classical music a reflection of the deadlocked political system?
* The tyranny of fixed-pitch instruments. Before an amalgamation of western and eastern 'classical' musics can happen, our system of temperament is going to have to give.
* On the other hand, maybe Riley's In C with was Ur-idea of all time.
* Could the current trans-national political turmoil centered on conflicts between Muslims and other groups prompt the next big idea - the reconciliation of seemingly conflicting ideas, not just accommodation. I'm especially intrigued by Europe, where Muslims have become part of the society. Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin certainly pointed in that direction.
* The booming Hispanic population (alluded to already). Within a half dozen years, the population of Houston, which, many people don't know, is the fourth largest city in the United States (but the 10th largest metropolitan area), will have an absolute majority of residents with Hispanic background.
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Performance ideas
By
Greg Sandow
posted @ 07/30/2004 2:39 pm
I love what Anne wrote, following my thought on new ideas about performance:
Take the whole early-music movement, arguably the biggest idea of the last 30 years (and one that, I believe, has affected how nearly every orchestra plays today).
And take stage direction in opera…Some of it is atrocious; some of it is wonderful; but it’s the most consistently creative element in today’s rather moribund opera world, has had a pervasive effect, and plays a far larger role in making opera a contemporary art form than most of the new operas that are written (as I said in an earlier post).
And I'd add a couple of other things. First, a real-life example of creative freedom in performance -- David Daniels singing Les nuits d'été. (Thanks, Anne, for telling me about that.)
Plus what Anne noted in her Times piece this morning about Mostly Mozart: programming that instead of treating music historically, instead tries to find links between things that are on the surface very different.
Other big ideas around right now are about classical music's survival, something we haven't touched on yet here (unless I missed something, which wouldn't surprise me). I've said in my ArtsJournal blog that I'm now hearing, in private, a level of pessimism about classical music's future that I've never encountered before, from people involved with major orchestras (some of them -- the people, not the orchestras -- with impeccably conservative pedigrees). So one new idea might go like this: If we don't make drastic changes, classical music is doomed.
Of course, that's not so much an idea as a call for ideas, and the one place I'd say with some confidence that things are going is toward the community. Orchestras are growing very interested in the cities around them, and the role in those cities they play. What will that mean for music itself? I wouldn't jump to any conclusions, or start wailing that music's going to be dumbed down. It could just as well grow smarter, as orchestras find ways to connect their musical ideals with an audience, especially one made up of the smart cultured people 50 and under (to give an approximate age) who right now don't give a spit about classical music. To some of these people, the classical mainstream sounds middlebrow, and far too much like movie music. They need smarter classical concerts, not dumber ones.
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Unfair on my Part
By
Kyle Gann
posted @ 07/30/2004 2:33 pm
To Wynne: I apologize for including you in that roundup, but I needed your quote to react against the fact that the critics keep claiming that there are no Big Ideas today, when I keep claiming, on behalf of composers, that there are. For rhetorical purposes I ended up implying that you were bashing the composers too; I should have found a more graceful way to handle that.
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Posting II. Composer bashing, female critics, form and content
By
Wynne Delacoma
posted @ 07/30/2004 1:57 pm
Dear heaven! Take a day off from reading the blog and spend an hour or two or three catching up. I haven't entirely caught up, but I can't resist jumping back into this lively discussion.
Kyle: If I understand you correctly, you think I'm among those blaming composers for the current lack of a Big Idea. ABSOLUTELY NOT. I had hoped my initial posting made it clear that I question the enitre idea that Big Ideas are necessary or always efficacious. To my mind, Big Ideas are as rare as golden ages, precious and invigorating in part because of their rarity. Opera history has been filled with gifted singers but few golden ages. Big Ideas are the result of a happy alignment of all kinds of forces, from societal trends to artistic talent. Composers have a difficult enough task writing their own music. I would never ask them to take responsibility for coming up with the next Big Idea as well.
Re the gender question: I grew up reading the lyrical but hard-hitting prose of Claudia Cassidy, for decades Chicago's most powerful theater and classical music critic. Opera came to Chicago in the mid-1950s courtesy of Carol Fox, tough-minded founder of Lyric Opera of Chicago. It never occurred to me that classical music or music criticism was a man's game. Luckily, by the time I discovered my lowly minority status, I was already on my way. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
I'd like to raise a question you all might be interested in discussing. How much of the unwelcome distinctions we've been noting between high culture and low, pop music and classical are the result of the way classical music is presented? Would boundaries be more easily breached if our orchestras weren't locked into a rigid system of subscription concerts? How does the fact that orchestras have to earn and fund-raise millions of dollars to meet their budgets influence the music they present and how they present it? Is the form of the standard symphony orchestra inhibiting its openness to new ideas?
Any thoughts?
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What's success?
By
Scott Cantrell
posted @ 07/30/2004 1:04 pm
Reader Gary Panetta asks: Where's music's Toni Morrison?
No composer, at least anytime recently, has entered the public consciousness with anything like the breadth of Ms. Morrison. That's a function of the lower profile of "serious" music in general. Everyone gets taught at least some literature in school, but rarely music. Reading--if only directions for connecting the DVD player--is part of daily life. Music is an elective, and beyond singing the simplest tune it can seem a hopelessly arcane one.
Decades ago, Ned Rorem pointed out that well-educated people who could discuss the latest authors, artists and filmmakers often ventured no further than Peter, Paul and Mary when it came to music. Most Americans can read English, but very few can read music. I'm not sure "art" music--whatever we want to call it--is as near death as some suggest, but it's definitely a minority pursuit, right down there with jazz.
There was a time when Benjamin Britten was widely known in England and Shostakovich in the Soviet Union. I wonder if America has ever had so high-profile a composer. Even the remarkably versatile and outgoing Copland. Bernstein was famous for his conducting and TV programs.
John raises the issue of which composers "make it" and which don't. Has anyone figured out a formula for this? I think I know why we value Beethoven more than Hummel, but library shelves may well groan beneath yards and yards of unjustly forgotten music.
I'm a great devote of the English composer Herbert Howells--ever heard of him? Wrote elegant music, as exquisitely orchestrated as Ravel, deeply emotional at times. You can hear a number of his works on CD, but even in England his music rarely appears in the concert hall.
Today? Well, John Adams certainly seems to be successful, but how many well-educated people actually know his name or his music? Jake Heggie and Mark Adamo must be chortling all the way to the bank with their unashamedly populist operas. Is that "success?" Rouse, Torke, Saariaho, Andriessen, Part, Hersch, Ades all probably pay their bills by composing. Lowell Liebermann says he has a six-figure income from composing. Is that success?
No way do we know what composers history will judge the major figures of our age. And who's to say history will be right?
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arrgh, or however you spell it
By
John Rockwell
posted @ 07/30/2004 12:16 pm
Twice I've crafted incredibly thoughtful postings, hit "publish" and seen them disappear. I also can't read the continuations of the readers' letters. So much for my hailing technology as one of the next big ideas.
What I had written was a kind of response to Kyle, bascially lamenting how high/low had taken over this conversation and stripped away the veneer of politeness to reveal all the old prejudices and resentments. I worry sometimes that the composers Kyle champions are those left over from the 70's who haven't "made it," making it being not topping the charts but winning the respect of fellow composers and fellow artists and enough critics to earn a place in the broader conversation. The point about Partch is well taken, but eventually he did make it, and a lot of Kyle's over-50's have not, and probably will not. For that, I think, it's tired to blame the pop-music business or misguided critics or a cruel and uncaring world.
But this blog is supposed to be about big ideas, not big music, or even pretty darn good music. So back to the beginning: for me, present-day big ideas include high/low, Western/non-Western and technology in all its forms. Ideas don't produce music; they reflect it. But there are enough ideas, and enough good composers out there, to make me optimistic.
Loved Alex's all-purpose polemical repostes.
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Clarifcation, Departure
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/30/2004 11:49 am
To reader John Shaw: nowhere in my initially huffy and eventually tone-down response to Kyle was there anything even approaching the beginning of an initial cogitation toward the glimmering of a notion that "pop is better than new classical." Possibly the confusion lies in this sentence: "What has NOT been said is that pop musicians have produced most of the significant music." To be absolutely clear: the import of this sentence is that no one on this blog except perhaps Robert Fink is saying that "pop is better." I myself have never thought and never said any such thing. I'm not in the business of ranking different genres of music — it's untrue to my experience and unhelpful to my readers.
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READER: Wow!
By
Jan Herman
posted @ 07/30/2004 11:24 am
Wow! That's my one-word conclusion to two days' worth of CC, so much of which... read more
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Fighting Words with Words
By
Kyle Gann
posted @ 07/30/2004 11:18 am
Ross: Do we need this kind of classification anymore -- "postclassical," "postminimalist," "totalist"?
We needed it in the '90s for a very practical reason, because we were sick and tired of critics calling us minimalists (which we weren't), and it was holding back public perception of our music. (It worked beautifully, by the way - none of us was ever called a minimalist again.) And I sort of thought discussing such movements was the point of this blog. Sorry.
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READER: Quit Complaining, Start Writing
By
Marc Geelhoed
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READER: Defending Kyle
By
John Shaw
posted @ 07/30/2004 10:54 am
No, Alex, there is not a smidgen of truth in your accusation that Kyle is dogmatic. He’s championed... read more
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READER:Un-Self-Consciousness In Seattle
By
Gavin Borchert
posted @ 07/30/2004 10:51 am
A couple contributors have mentioned they'd be curious to hear from composers themselves. At the risk of making this blog a little Seattle-centric, let me try to describe what's going on in the compositional scene here with regard to the "Big Idea" idea... read more
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The New New Thing
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/30/2004 9:42 am
An interesting thing has happened: Kyle Gann has accused me and others of "composer bashing" because we have suggested that pop musicians rather than composers have been the source of many or most "big ideas" after minimalism. What has NOT been said is that pop musicians have produced most of the significant music. Big ideas are not the same as major works. I, for one, think it's wonderful that composers are no longer so much in the business of manufacturing big ideas. It's odd that Kyle should understand this as an insult. I wonder whether he feels a certain hidden nostalgia for that modernist heyday when composers unveiled their grand ideas under the banner of grand nomenclature. Do we need this kind of classification anymore -- "postclassical," "postminimalist," "totalist"? Do we need to set up a club and say who's in and who's out? Isn't that perpetuating the old Second Viennese School / Darmstadt syndrome?
Justin's point about music of non-European traditions is incredibly important. I've been noticing how few Europeans are cropping these days on my own ever-revolving personal lists of significant living composers. I wrote up a "top 10 works of the last 10 years" for BBC Music Magazine a couple of years ago, and I was amazed to find not a single German, Italian, or French name on my list. Instead, three Americans (Reich, Adams, Carter), two Englishmen (Knussen, Adès), an Argentinian (Golijov), two Finns (Lindberg, Saariaho), a Transylvanian (Ligeti), and a rock band (Radiohead). Still pretty Anglo-American, I know, but very different from what I might have come up with 10 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised to find my list a decade from now filled with South American, African, and Asian names. What composers/works would the rest of you name as the most striking of the last few years? Why do they stand out?
Reply to Anne: I'll agree that modern opera production can have a galvanic effect. Schlingensief's Parsifal was not, to my taste, a case in point. Director-opera obviously serves as a substitute for new opera; directors are essentially recomposing operas and presenting them as world premieres. I'll agree, tentatively, that the genre "plays a far larger role in making opera a contemporary art form than most of the new operas that are written." But I think it's a really tragic state of affairs, one that opera houses should try to reverse by seeking out bold new opera at every opportunity. Alas, they have so little incentive to do so.
I'll be out of town til Monday, so here are all-purpose rejoinders to any further internecine assaults: Wrong! Absolutely not! Are you kidding me? You sound like Adorno! Six of one, half dozen of the other! Busoni is rolling in his grave! etc.
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READER: Kyle, I Hear You
By
John Shaw
posted @ 07/30/2004 9:23 am
Kyle Gann calls me out -- I've never heard any of the music of any of his totalists. I get the strong impression that most of the assembled critics haven't heard much of them either... read more
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What's the Big Idea?
By
Anne Midgette
posted @ 07/30/2004 8:32 am
Amid the problems of definition swirling around here, we all seem to be assuming that the big ideas we’re talking about are necessarily contained in new musical works. This is kind of ironic because (as this discussion demonstrates) the field of classical music doesn’t quite know how to deal with music that’s being written today. We can’t even agree on how to define it.
After following this debate, and thinking about something Greg said in an earlier posting about ideas in performance, it has struck me that the big ideas in the classical music field that stir up controversy, provoke the audience, and get discussed are about the performance of old music rather than the directions of new music. Take the whole early-music movement, arguably the biggest idea of the last 30 years (and one that, I believe, has affected how nearly every orchestra plays today).
And take stage direction in opera (Alex, this one’s for you, since I intimate from your earlier post that you’re going to do some Schlingensief-bashing in the near future). Some of it is atrocious; some of it is wonderful; but it’s the most consistently creative element in today’s rather moribund opera world, has had a pervasive effect, and plays a far larger role in making opera a contemporary art form than most of the new operas that are written (as I said in an earlier post).
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To Kyle, and Richard Einhorn
By
Justin Davidson
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:47 am
I guess I don't read those excerpts the way you do. Alex has stated his preference for one set of composers over another, but not, I think, dissed the whole lot. Greg made a reasoned generalization, which is by definition going to leave out part of the picture. Overlooking Partch is not the same as telling all composers to shove it. Wynne's statement is about the topic of this discussion, not a wholesale attack on composers.
Richard, thanks for that clarification. I'm with you now, though it seems to me that discussing the relationship between money and music is not that far from discussing chronological development, since examining Mozart's finances is another way of putting his music in historical context.
It would be great to hear from more composers, by the way.
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READER: Money Vs. "Music That Matters"
By
Richar Einhorn
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:47 am
Justin is right that Hip Hop and Steve Reich's "City Life" do not equal a parody mass (although maybe the Low Symphony could be somewhere close to one). But I disagree that a flattened history is not terribly useful for critics... read more
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READER: Flogging For Novelty?
By
Joanne Forman
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:45 am
"To thine own self be true" may be a thundering cliche, but cliches are true. When I came in to composing, back in the stone age, you HAD HAD HAD to do serial (or twelve-tone--what a misnomer!) music... read more
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Composer Bashing
By
Kyle Gann
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:40 am
...the big, scene-setting ideas in music of the last thirty or forty years have really appeared in popular music. It's there that you get a sense of kinetic technical progress. - Ross
And where were these Big Ideas, so central to their time, in the classical music of the '50s? Nowhere, I'd say. Where was existentialism? Psychoanalysis? The Beat Generation? - Sandow [ouch! take that, Harry Partch, who was the Kerouac of music]
I mean, maybe there's a big idea seizing those who write poetry in Urdu as a hobby, but can it legitimately be compared to chorale preludes on Lutheran hymn tunes or the birth of the symphony or "the music of the future" or even Serialism, back when? Trees falling unheard in forests, etc. - Rockwell
If I were a composer, I'd want to see what I could learn from each of these discoveries. I'd be particularly interested in how relatively simple harmonic designs go hand in hand with dizzying textural complexity. Pop music is full of fresh ideas about tonality. In this area, classical composers are lagging behind. - Ross [ALL classical composers? ALL? You've heard every one?]
It is beyond me why we would feel the need to search for big ideas--or worst yet, predict the next one--at a time, like now, when none is obviously rising to the surface. - Delacoma
[And I recall a comment about how pop music is more technologically sophisticated than new classical music, but to the relief of several thousand electronic composers, it seems to have been wisely withdrawn.]
It’s always easy to blame the composers, because, in any given generation, 90 percent of them are not going to write music that deserves to be remembered forever - as true in Mozart’s generation as today. Any well-founded generalization about composers will inevitably be to the disadvantage of the breed. “Of course there are exceptions...” but in art, it’s only the exceptions who count. Nevertheless, one of my points is that even the composers who never join anyone’s pantheon may significantly contribute to the development of a musical language. It takes a whole village to raise an -ism.
related reader post
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READER: Jazz - MIA?
By
George Hunka
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:25 am
One of the words I see conspicuously absent from the conversation on CC over the last few days is "jazz." I'm assuming this is so because nobody wants to open that particular can of worms... read more
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Who's saying Give Up?
By
Justin Davidson
posted @ 07/30/2004 7:02 am
Kyle, thanks for that illuminating account. I'm going to make a point of brushing up on some of the music you've mentioned. But where do you get the idea that critics want composers to conform? To what? It seems to me that despite our arguments and predilections, one thing we share is curiosity.
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Inside a Big Idea
By
Kyle Gann
posted @ 07/30/2004 6:54 am
Writing as a composer for a moment, and in response to some of the comments, I’d like to talk for a moment about how the Big Idea looks from the artist’s side.
Listening to minimalist music in the ‘70s, it dawned on me that Steve Reich’s polyrhythms in Drumming and the punchy, ametrical rhythmic patterns of Phil Glass’s Music in Fifths offered a context in which one could create a new performance practice for the tempo clashes I loved in the musics of Ives, Cowell, and Nancarrow. I started exploring this territory in 1983 in a piece called Mountain Spirit. Over the next ten years, I learned that a lot of other composers born in the ‘50s had had the same idea at around the same time: Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, Ben Neill, John Luther Adams, David First, Lois Vierk, Art Jarvinen, Evan Ziporyn, Diana Meckley, Eve Beglarian, Larry Polansky, and to some extent Nick Didkovsky. Other composers developed related ideas in electronic media: Joshua Fried, Ron Kuivila, Carl Stone. Playing with tempo clashes of 4 against 5, 8 against 9, 13 against 29, and so on, this music was not at all minimalist, but in a way a complete subversion of minimalism. By 1991, I had written an article about the remarkably similar techniques used by these composers, unbeknownst to each other, and afterward the Big Idea we were all working on acquired a controversial name: totalism. We didn’t premeditatedly concoct this Big Idea: it appeared on the horizon of the collective unconscious and drew us all in.
There has been, in this conversation, some criticism of composers writing music for music’s sake, writing music that deals in merely technical issues instead of meaningful social ones. But in the early development of a Big Idea, this emphasis on technique is entirely necessary. You can’t suddenly, by sheer dint of will, write a political opera in a style only five years old. I’ve been heavily influenced by some of my contemporaries, especially Mikel Rouse, Bill Duckworth, and more recently Beth Anderson; and by that facile, threadbare word “influence,” I mean I stole from them both techniques and what I can only call a way of listening. I also heard things that I didn’t think worked, and attempted to correct other people’s failures in my own music. We all listened to each other, stole from each other, veered away from each other’s miscalculations. This is how a new style develops, and the value of a Big Idea that attracts a lot of composers is that a new musical language grows up that is not merely a product of one creative mind, but a collective contribution of many composers. (After all, to offer another of our historical parallels: the classical symphony began in the 1720s, but not until Haydn and Mozart started stealing from each other around 1780 did the style coalesce into something lasting. Mozart and Haydn wrote a hell of a lot of string quartets and piano concerti, heard for many years only by small groups of cognoscenti, before they were finally accomplished enough to write Don Giovanni and The Creation.)
In any musical language, some composers will eventually transcend the merely technical aspects, and some won’t. (Haydn and Mozart transcended, Wagenseil and Wanhal didn’t, but that doesn’t mean the latter pair’s contributions weren’t helpful; Wagenseil was Haydn’s first model.) In the case of totalism, most of us have attempted to write larger works of some social significance. Branca wrote symphonies for electric guitars which have an immense underground following. Mikel wrote a technologically sophisticated opera, Dennis Cleveland, based on a talk show format, which has been performed at Lincoln Center, around Australia, and elsewhere. Ben wrote a big multimedia piece about AIDS, ITSOFOMO, and has since become a rather successful crossover artist in the ambient field, even applying his style to commercial work. Gordon and Adams have had considerable success on the orchestra circuit and with recordings on Nonesuch and New World. I wrote a political music theater work about racism, Custer and Sitting Bull, which I’ve performed more than 25 times on three continents. With the single exception of myself, all of these composers had some background in pop or rock music, and many incorporated aspects of that music into what they were doing; if you want tempos to clash, a powerful backbeat is a good starting point. Some of these people wouldn’t call their music “classical” with a gun to their head.
Clearly no one in this forum thinks this is a Big Idea except me, but the jury’s going to be out for many years yet, and the record I’ve painted above is hardly that of a tree falling in the forest with no one hearing it. Except for Gordon and Adams once in a blue moon, classical critics are not going to run into any of this repertoire at their local Orchestra Hall, but that’s neither our fault nor our concern. In strictest terms, totalism was a ‘90s phenomenon, and many of us have moved away from this particular Big Idea in its purest form. The musical language has not entirely coalesced yet, but it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at all without a lot of energetic cross-breeding.
Yet to read many of the recommendations from critics here, the message I see being sent to these composers is: GIVE UP. Imagine if this forum had appeared in the 1950s, and been read by Harry Partch while he was still struggling to create his microtonal orchestra in the face of massive institutional indifference. Partch would have read that he was a tree falling in the forest unheard, his recordings collected only by a handful. “Stop wasting your time on pure-music pieces like Castor and Pollux that just develop your new scale," he'd be told. "Imitate the pop musicians, Harry, that’s where the energy is. Quit bucking convention. CONFORM.” Had Harry listened, he would never have written Delusion of the Fury, never have become famous in the 1960s, never have become an incredible inspiration to subsequent generations of musicians. He did hear such messages, and ignored them. If this is truly the message that classical critics want to send to today’s composers: no composer worth his salt is going to pay the slightest attention to your recommendations, thank god.
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Some things are new, actually.
By
Justin Davidson
posted @ 07/30/2004 5:56 am
I'm struck by the way most of us have been treating history very elastically. Instinctively, we look to the past to explain the present and predict the future, and because, as Richard Einhorn points out, we have such a great historical span at our fingertips, we take a very long view. That's potentially as misleading as having no sense of history at all. Einhorn sees a history of music "flattened" by the instant availability of everything, which may be the case for composers but is not terribly useful for critics. At the same time, focusing too much on precedent makes it difficult to see what is really new.
To say, as Charles Ward does, that sampling was tried centuries ago, is a little like saying that an automobile is just a glorified covered wagon. Sampling technology has given composers a radical new tool for the manipulation of sound, different in kind from borrowing or allusion. Hip-hop and Steve Reich's "City Life" are not equivalent to a Renaissance parody mass. Precedent is not equivalence.
Scott is right: Popular music is not new, but "pop music" with a global reach is. John is right, too: There is a fundamental difference between Debussy's exotic dip into gamelan, or Stravinsky's into ragtime, or Mozart's into "Turkish" music (really, now!) and the cultural blender in which virtually every composer lives today.
Those two things - global pop and the availabilty of music from so many times and so many places - are connected, and they come as close to a big idea as I think we're going to get. You can decry the corporate monopoly of pop music (which I gather is fading in any case), but the same channels that bring Britney to Bangladesh also bring banghra to Queens.
It's interesting, too, how parochial most of this conversation has been. Aside from Bjork, virtually every musician we've named has been on the Anglo-American axis (and Bjork sings in English and lives with the artist Matthew Barney). but Surely one of the major incubators of popular music in the last 40 years has been Brazil? And we can't really get a complete picture of classical contemporary music without knowing a little about, say the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh? (Okay, she moved from Baku to Berlin a few years ago.) There is no longer any one musical center - or even three - where everything of interest originates.
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READER: Pop is Not Off-Topic
By
John Shaw
posted @ 07/30/2004 12:29 am
Dear Alex Ross, Thanks for the early Bjork history. Very interesting! (And thanks for your blog and work in general.) 2 minor points of disagreement with things you've said here... read more
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READER: Time is not of the Essence
By
Tom Myron
posted @ 07/30/2004 12:13 am
Here's my big idea. The belief that it is somehow significant that we have all the music of the past 500-plus years available to us at the swipe of a credit card is a red herring responsible for a massive fit of cultural self-consciousness... read more
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Thursday, July 29
Provocation!
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/29/2004 10:42 pm
"Will critics ever shed the need to be tragically hip?" asks Charles Ward. Not before other critics shed the need to be tragically snooty. I don't know what Kitchen saxophonist was judged to be "fundamentally barely literate musically" back in 1979, and perhaps she fit that description perfectly, but Björk makes for a very poor contemporary counterpart. She attended the Tónmenntaskóli music school in Reykjavik from the age of five to the age of fifteen, by the end of which time she was playing atonal Icelandic concertos on the flute and listening avidly to Messiaen, Stockhausen, and Cage. She stopped practicing classical music because she found it to be a narrow, repressive world. Punk and dance music gave her more to think about. We've lost countless young brilliant minds to the "other side" because of our pedantry and hauteur, fresh examples of which are all too easily found.
I fear I've been wandering too far off topic, so I'll be mute about the pop stuff from now on. There is no such thing as "popular music" anyway, if you take it to mean whatever is not classical music. What sound comes to mind when the term is used? Britney Spears? Brad Mehldau? Missy Elliott? Youssou N'Dour? These people have less in common with each other than do, say, Wuorinen and Golijov. Fragmentation is even more widespread in pop than in classical.
related reader comment
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Jotting III: When John Rockwell took a coalition of the willing to a downtown club, or, will critics ever shed the need to be tragically hip.
By
Charles Ward
posted @ 07/29/2004 9:27 pm
Often when I hear the latest rapper to round the block, I remember an experience at the New Music American Festival in New York in 1979. The downtown scene had reached a boiling point. The Music Critics Association held a long seminar at the Kitchen for curious members and John was their guide. One evening some followed him downtown to a club. In the basement, alone in a small room, was a saxophonist sitting on a chair. She had a rhythm machine on the floor pounding out a beat and she was wailing away to it. Today the chanter is often less coherent and the rhythmic accompaniment even blunter, but ptherwise there's been little fundmental progress. Both were/are fundamentally barely literate musically.
At the MCA seminar, the same issues were flogged as on this blog – from the embarrassment at the word classical, to pop music as the future of the world. Arty pop groups got gushes. Only the names have changed. Now it’s Bjork instead of Blondie.
Of course popular music has affected classical music, as Scott noted. Who knows. Maybe Leonin and Perotin got the inspiration for their revolutionary treatment of chant from rowdy singing at a watering hole in the shadow of Paris’ 12th-century cathedral. Certainly some important ideas and performers came out of that downtown
But fundamentally the aesthetics are totally different. I’m reminded of that every time I go to a concert of 16th-century secular instrumental music. Put one of those short pieces against a current pop song and, when all the sonic and stylistic differences are stripped out, the two aren’t that different. Put the same current pop song up against a late-19th century symphony and the differences are immense – because of the fundamentally different aesthetic about the nature of composition, the handling of materials and the purpose of the work. The reason music students are taught harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, etc. is not just to amuse or entertain them or exercise power over them but to train them in the fundamentals of the craft of classical music.
As to Scott’s question about the globalization of pop music, it’s a function of the technological changes I referred to in my first post. A lot of pop music remains what used to be called an oral tradition. Once an efficient and effective way of capturing it and transmitting it was invented – digital recording, CDs, satellite transmission, etc (as well as piracy and the movement to more democratic governments world-wide) – it was easy for well-practiced marketing people to turn performers and their music into a global phenomenon.
A question to explore could be what facets of pop music classical composers might use. Sampling’s been tried (a few centuries ago). Perhaps working off the kind of complexity that 24-track recording allows?
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READER: Is Hip-Hop The Big Idea?
By
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
posted @ 07/29/2004 7:07 pm
I'm glad that Alex Ross has brought up hip hop - and surprised that it wasn't mentioned before. If we are to look for a 'Big Idea' in current music - a project that I am ambivalent about - then surely the worldwide dominance of hip hop must be it?... read more
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Pop music precedent
By
Scott Cantrell
posted @ 07/29/2004 3:09 pm
Anne picked up on my question: Is their any historical precedent for what we now call pop music? In the sense of a huge international-conglomerate business, with product marketed on an enormous scale, airing on radio stations from Omaha to Vladivostok, I think not. I'm not saying that's bad or good--I don't even know what it means--but it does seem to me something wholly unprecedented.
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READER: Not One Line In The Sand
By
Molly Sheridan
posted @ 07/29/2004 3:02 pm
I have to admit that even though I spend my days writing about the hard to classify "new classical music," I was initially disturbed by the "Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music" premise. At first I thought it was unintentional... read more
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To: AC Douglas
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/29/2004 3:01 pm
Reader AC Douglas, publisher of the unapologetically pro-elitist Sounds and Fury blog, writes that the likes of Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin are "'classical' music produced by non-'classical' composers, self-identified, and performed in and through non-'classical' venues. You simply confuse the issue by referring to such music as 'pop' music." Indeed, the word "pop" is bizarre and ironic when applied to a proudly difficult band like Sonic Youth, not to mention a politically radical group like Public Enemy. But it's not classical music, either — nowhere close. It's incredibly interesting because it's neither here nor there. By the way, ACD, I believe you are going to enjoy my review of the Schlingensief Parsifal.
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A few responses to other postings
By
Anne Midgette
posted @ 07/29/2004 2:57 pm
John: I disagree with your equation of fragmentation and despair. What about Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, or the countless other artists who have moved productively from one style to another, or used many styles in a single work? For many, this so-called fragmentation (shall we call it polystilism, to give it a more positive spin?) is extremely fertile. Others, of course, may find there aren’t enough limits or guidelines.
The whole debate about classical and pop music, high and low, seems to have become classical music’s sour-grapes way of justifying to itself that it is no longer popular. But these are not exactly new ideas (to respond to Scott’s question about historical parallels). Think of Stendahl describing Italian music in his Life of Rossini. It was definitely the pop music of its day, viewed as cheap trash (or “macaroni”) by the highbrows.
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Back to fragmentation for a minute
By
Anne Midgette
posted @ 07/29/2004 2:27 pm
I see I'm responding to posts that are already a few hours old. But I wanted to second Scott and Justin on the fragmentation issue, while noting that this is by no means confined to classical music. The visual arts, dance, and poetry, at the very least, have also been reflecting the lack of a unified cultural outlook in recent decades.
That fragmentation, indeed, is a part of the creative process today. Think Picasso, think Stravinsky; it's now generally understood that one artist can wear a number of different stylistic masks, deal with a number of different big ideas, in the course of his lifetime.
More recently, there are examples of artists who had to work through and get past the requisite "big ideas" of their time in order to find their own. I think of David Del Tredici, who moved through and then cast off academic atonality and now works in a lush neo-Romantic Expressionism. (An aside: serialism in the 60s and 70s seems to me to have been de facto less a Big Idea than a straitjacket in which to restrain young composers.) Not dissimilar is Robert Irwin, the visual artist, who started as an Abstract Expressionist and moved through Minimalism to emerge with a kind of personal baroque style. The journey of both of these artists involved casting off big ideas, rather than remaining bound by them.
One notable difference is that Irwin is embraced as a grand old man in his field, in part because visual arts institutions are far more committed to new ideas than are classical music institutions. If opera houses were run like museums, they would be scrambling to present Dum Dee Tweedle, Einstein on the Beach, The Ghosts of Versailles, Three Tales, and other truly interesting (love ’em or hate ’em) new operas. Instead, we get the musical equivalent of salon painting: The Great Gatsby, Little Women, Dead Man Walking. (Again, love ’em or hate ’em; I’m not saying they’re bad, but they aren’t exactly contemporary art in the sense that the former pieces are.)
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READER: Waiting For Godot
By
Colin Eatock
posted @ 07/29/2004 1:48 pm
I don’t know what’s going to happen next – and judging by this blog, most music critics don’t know either. But here’s what I’d like to see happen... read more
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READER: No More Historical Progress
By
Richard Einhorn
posted @ 07/29/2004 1:44 pm
Most of the writers here assume, with a greater or lesser sense of defensiveness, that distinctions between high and low art are pretty meaningless when you're dealing with great artists (eg, Hugo Wolf and Kate Bush). You'll get no argument about that from me, but... read more
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READER: Pop Innovation (Alex Ross)
By
Jeff H.
posted @ 07/29/2004 1:24 pm
I'm not sure I would agree with you as far as pop music being in the forefront of extending the borders of tonality, but I do concur that elements of pop could be heeded by composers... read more
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the magpie
By
John Rockwell
posted @ 07/29/2004 1:10 pm
Picking my way through the latest entries, as we magpies are wont to, some comments:
Robert Fink is a smart fella (I know this in part because I heard him at this spring's Seattle EMP rock & roll symposium). I agree with most everything in his entry, except the dissing of Rossini. P.S.: Does his "crashing the party" mean that anyone can join in now, not ghettoized into "reader comments"? Or just the crashers that Doug likes?!
I'm not sure fragmentation and disunity are a very stirring big idea, or rallying point, or stylistic signature. Sounds more like despair to me. Big ideas, as I said before, are not enunciated and then slavishly followed by composers. They represent spontaneous excitement generating around shared ideas (e.g., minimalism), sometimes (especially in France) self-consciously articulated in a manifesto (e.g., Boulez).
I think the comparing of muscians' journeys to exotic climes in the 17th and 18th centuries with today's musical multi-culturalism is dead wrong. There is a big, not a little, difference between appropriating sounds and ideas into a tradition that you know without thinking is superior and genuine amalgams of cultures (e.g. Glass's variant on ragas in his early minimalism). Not to speak of non-Western composers, trained in Western classical practice or not, amalgamating away with OUR music. I mean, the Beijing conservatory that spawned all the Chinese composers now active in the U.S. is one source, but so are Bill Laswell's collaborations with world musicians from hither and yon.
Not being much of a fan of Elvis Costello, I recall that I myself once equated Joni Mitchell in the 70's with Schubert, and not apologetically, then or now. Cf. her "Amelia," on the "Hejira" album.
I'm amused by the lingering effort of some entrants to maintain a valuative distinction between lower pop and higher classical. (Not that distinctions can't profitably be made between ANY two things.) In particular, by invoking the dreary term commercialism, as in Adorno's "culture industry." Who says academic composers, struggling for tenure, desperate not to offend their teachers, jockeying for position among their peers, operate with "fewer constraints" than the popsters?
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Beyond categories?
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/29/2004 1:00 pm
Robert Fink's post is very welcome, although he distorts my position re: composers and pop music, displaying, if I may say, the bad academic habit of reading ideologies into innocuous turns of phrase. I obviously don't think of pop music as merely a goldmine for composers. My website, www.therestisnoise.com (see "popular" division), demonstrates what some colleagues may actually see as an excessive respect for pop artists as "real" artists. I was simply saying that composers have a lot to learn from pop music, not hegemonically mandating a colonialist enslavement of the Oriental Other.
Otherwise, I agree to a great extent with the Finkian intervention, its pop-supremacist attitudes excepted. I think we're going to see a partial collapse of the boundary between so-called classical music and neighboring spheres in the popular arena. We'll see an increasing interchange of roles: two harbingers are Steve Reich, who's become an icon of modern electronic music, and Jonny Greenwood, who's launching a career as an avant-gardish concert composer, or, more accurately, resuming the compositional career that the world fame of Radiohead interrupted. (Elvis Costello I don't see as a harbinger of anything in particular.) Then you have someone like Björk, whom I'm writing about now, and who lives in a lovely Icelandic world where all these distinctions are boring and marginal.
All the same, classical music will remain its own beast, with its own language and discipline and lore. There won't be a total breakdown of categories. Simply, I'm hoping, an erosion of lazy old assumptions about the inborn intellectual superiority of one kind of music over another. Complex music can be very stupid; simple music can be very smart. There's pop music which is very complex and very unpopular. There's classical music which is very cheap and very cloying. Seriousness is something earned; it's not the automatic gift of a certain amount of education.
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Composers are composers, but distinctions are still worthwhile
By
Andrew Druckenbrod
posted @ 07/29/2004 12:47 pm
Robert -- musicologists: wordy, yes, (not too mention overly zealous in the use of quotation marks!!!) but certainly welcome to this discussion. Your comments on the term classical are particularly lucid. What a tired, misinformed term, indeed.
Of course we should break down the walls between categories of classical and popular as high and low and look for other qualities, other “buckets,” as you say. I definitely hear all music as music first, only after do the prescribed categories ossify in my head or force their way into writing so that my views can be expressed. Likewise, I view the creators all as composers, just some writing what is referred to as pop while others write what we call classical. The idea that Elvis Costello is a considered somehow lesser and called a songwriter and Schubert held higher and referred to as a composer is strange when you consider the high level both have achieved in song. I am not equating the two, but saying that they are certainly part of the same conversation.
Again, as I said before, why do we need to judge everything against a central trunk of someone’s concept of music? For instance, I love the epic ambient strains of the Icelandic pop group Sigur Ros, which I recently saw with a string quartet playing alongside of it. I have heard song form, lyric form, strophic form, ABA, and more turned so cleverly and beautifully on its head by pop and hip-hop songwriters/composers, not to mention their sly and poignant use of quotation and sampling. So the categorizations as they now stand stink. I wish the fragmentation that Scott quite rightly talks of carried over to the liquidation or re-casting of the labels we use. I can’t stand it when I run into some snob who tells me how bereft of quality pop is when it’s clear they don’t listen to it and visa versa.
But still I think -- without a bogus need to defend classical music’s existence or to gain rhetorical control over it – there are differences between commercial music (limited to a smaller time frame and music) and music that has fewer constraints. There’s also worth in discerning and discussing the differences between music (classical, opera, pop or folk) with lyrics and that without them. (I am not trying to revive the whole instrumental vs. programmatic music debate, but just to say the latter is not an art form existing in a one-to-one connection with meaning and relevance in culture.) I think I would enjoy Beethoven’s Ninth in a fragmented world such as today, but it would also be fruitful to understand what he was playing off of.
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High/Low Redux
By
Justin Davidson
posted @ 07/29/2004 12:42 pm
Somehow we've wandered into the territory covered by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art some years ago: High/Low, which dealt extensively with these distinctions and grey areas. Those in-between areas are huge and fertile and I think that the bands Alex and others have named belong there. But Robert Fink's re-shuffling of categories so that deep music is on one side and fluff on the other - is going too far.
What separates classical from pop is not a hierarchy of taste, or even an incompatibility of musical values. But they do still belong in different categories, however porous, becuase they sustain different economies, operate on different timetables, involve different groups of people and institutions and have different markers of prestige. Look at the attention Matt Haimovitz has gotten for playing the cello in clubs like CBGBs - it's a small gesture, but a significant one.
Classical and pop musicians also operate on completely different scales. Most of the composers we've named sell CDs by the dozens if they're really, really lucky. (In some cases, I have a feeling Kyle Gann may own the only extant copy.) Any pop band or indie rock group or rapper important enough even to get noticed has sales with a significant string of zeroes. That's a qualitative jump which suggests that the two worlds can overlap only so far.
I'm not trying to suggest that we focus on obscure and unsaleable music for its own sake, or that obscurity is a criterion for true art. That would be pretentious and preposterous. I am saying, though, that Louis Andriessen, for example, is recognized by a system and deals with external pressures that are very different from those that apply in the case of Lou Reed, even if musically there is quite a bit of overlap between them. It's not "colonial," to use Fink's word, to note that difference.
Alex's use of the word "goldmine" wasn't exploitative either, except in the sense that all composers exploit other composers, digging through their music for ideas. Composers listen selfishly and everybody steals. Some of the technologies that pop musicians use so prodigiously now were first developed at Columbia and other universities, after all.
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Multiculturalism
By
Scott Cantrell
posted @ 07/29/2004 12:31 pm
There's been a fair bit of huffing and puffing here about multiculturalism, as if this were something new.
Look at all the composers who traveled widely--at least by standards of their time--in the 17th century. Bach was about as multiculti as you could be in the 18th century, drawing on musical ideas from Italy and France as well as the scattered cultures that hadn't yet coalesced into Germany. Mozart incorporated imitation "Turkish" music.
Multiculturalism receded in the 19th century, with the rise of nationalist movements. But this sparked a new interest among "classical" composers in folk music (Brahms, Dvorak, Mahler, Bartok, Kodaly, Vaughan Williams, Copland). Britten, Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison pioneered the incorporation of Asian influences in Western concert music. And, say what you will about the "condescending" attitude of early 20th century composers toward ragtime and jazz, those influences did make themselves felt.
Is there, though, any historic parallel to what we now call popular music?
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Fragmentation
By
Scott Cantrell
posted @ 07/29/2004 12:01 pm
Lots of newer composers' names have been bandied about here. But the last composers whose new works were eagerly awaited by relatively broad audiences and widely discussed were Copland, Britten and Shostakovich. And that was 30 years ago.
Serialism is the favorite whipping boy for the growing disconnect between composers and audiences. But I'm not convinced it was ever the force majeure we now make it out to be. In academia, maybe, but let's keep academia in perspective. New Criticism was all the rage in literary academia, but how much difference did it make to people who actually bought and read books?
I keep coming back to the issue of fragmentation. It really got underway in the aftermath of World War II. The U.S. was absorbing all these European composers and performers of multiple stripes. Amid postwar prosperity and feeling our oats as a dominant country, the music industry was expanding geometrically. Look at all the American opera companies, great and small, founded in the 1950s. Egged on by the American Federation of Musicians, orchestras vastly expanded their concert offerings. (In Brahms' Vienna, by contrast, the Vienna Philharmonic played--what?--four concerts a season.)
This expansion continued at least through the 1990s. Music lovers were increasingly freed to explore their narrowest interests. People who would crawl on their knees to hear the Tallis Scholars wouldn't walk across the street to hear the Berlin Philharmonic, and vice versa. If there ever was such a thing as "the classical music audience"--and I doubt there was--it has been completely fragmented into niche markets.
If there's a single "big idea," this is it--and it's not exactly an idea: fragmentation. For better or worse, I don't see Humpty Dumpty being put back together again.
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Reader Intervention: A Musicologist Crashes The Party!
By
Robert Fink
posted @ 07/29/2004 11:26 am
Big (non) Idea: "Classical Music" is Dead
Yo! Since no full-time musicological critics were invited to the party, and it's such an amazing party, I couldn't resist crashing. This discussion is at such a high level - it proves the hypothesis that in the Darwinian world of classical music journalism, where fewer and fewer critics are allotted less and less space to cover the phenomenon, only the strong survive. Kudos!
So, much of what I might observe, as a music historian and critic, has already been said: Big Ideas were less prevalent (and less salient) in the history of Western Art Music than one might assume; the hope that another Big Idea will arrive and "rescue" our stalled history of "great" music seems kind of like nostalgic, wishful thinking; and, crucially, popular music seems to have taken over the Big Idea carrier function that we once assumed only "classical" music could serve.
Watching pop music seep into the conversation has been fascinating. Many participants in the discussion know it well, write about it, even pioneered critical approaches that allowed some of it to mingle with the contemporary "classical" stuff (shout-out to you, Mr. Rockwell!). But maybe, for once, the ivory tower gives me freedom of speech (and employment): I'm a professional musicologist - I just study "music," and I can write about whatever kind of music I want, whether or not my training was designed to interest me in it.
I think the Big Idea here is the collapse of the biggest Big Idea of classical music: that there is such a thing as a single "classical music," analogous to the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans; that it defines the roots of "our" musical civilization the way Homer and Sophocles once did for Western Europe; that every educated member of the society should know at least that this "classical music" exists and that it is more important than ephemeral works in the vernacular; and that any serious contemporary composer has to fit into a canonic narrative selection of "great works" that can be traced back in the classical line to our Homer and Sophocles, .
So, I would submit for discussion the Big (Non) Idea: you cannot understand our culture's musical creativity at this moment in time if you persist in splitting the world of music up into "classical" (i.e.: art, serious, etc.) and "popular" musics. "Classical Music" (as a critical Big Idea) is dead.
This leads to some warpage in even the most determinedly ecumenical attitudes on display in this blog, as people struggle to reconcile the way they feel about current music with the ideological need to preserve some domain as "classical" and assert rhetorical control over it.
To read the rest of this post go HERE
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READER: Classically Not Pop
By
AC Douglas
posted @ 07/29/2004 10:49 am
You know, Alex, if the "pop" music you mention is truly as interesting, intricate, and complex as you describe it to be (and I take you at your word concerning that as I know nothing of any of that music), then it's not "pop" music at all, is it?... read more
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Female critics
By
Scott Cantrell
posted @ 07/29/2004 10:28 am
Thanks to Anne for clarifying her position at the Times. And for linking to an earlier Andante article she did on female critics, adding some names to my hastily compiled list.
I certainly should have included Sarah Bryan Miller at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Leslie Valdez at the San Jose Mercury News.
But my list was mainly full-time staff critics at newspapers, although I think Mary Ellen Hutton in Cincinnati (whom I included) is free-lance. Aren't two of the people on Anne's list free-lance: Heidi Waleson (Wall Street Journal) and Shirley Fleming (New York Post)? And now I learn that Anne is free-lance, too--and without a contract. Detroit's Nancy Malitz left the field--to our loss--years ago.
Alas, my point--and Anne's--about minimal female representation in music criticism stands.
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Pop Innovation
By
Alex Ross
posted @ 07/29/2004 10:07 am
On the question of composition's relationship to pop, which is emerging as a thread of our discussion, I want to clarify a couple of things. 1) In response to Justin D, I certainly don't think that pop music has a "lock" on anything. Musical history tells us that nothing is forever and everything is changeable. I believe it's perfectly possible that classical music will experience a massive resurgence in popularity in the next twenty or thirty years, and that composers will once again command cultural center stage. But it will only happen if those of us in the classical realm decide to change in fundamental ways our relationship with the culture at large -- as Greg Sandow has long urged us to do. 2) In response to Andrew Druckenbrod, I'm talking about purely musical ideas within "pop" (as problematic a term as "classical"), not the lyrics, the stage shows, the lifestyle apparatus, and so on. I'm thinking of the following: i) The extreme variation on A-B-A structure in songs by Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, and some other bands of the seventies and eighties, in which the "A" section is tonal and the "B" section is atonal or pure noise; ii) The use of samples in hip-hop tracks like Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome," in which an overwhelming, borderline-chaotic density of pre-recorded material is arranged according to precise rhythmic designs; iii) The use of advanced electronic production to create a hypnotically clean, austere sound-world, in records by Aphex Twin, Mark Bell, and other artists on the Warp and Rephlex labels; ...and so on.
If I were a composer, I'd want to see what I could learn from each of these discoveries. I'd be particularly interested in how relatively simple harmonic designs go hand in hand with dizzying textural complexity. Pop music is full of fresh ideas about tonality. In this area, classical composers are lagging behind. They are trained from an early age to view tonality as a closed, finished world, not as a language undergoing endless evolution. Minimalism, of course, is the great exception, which is why it's so hugely significant. Recent European trends such as Spectralism and the New Complexity have, to my ears, offered a few new processes but no new ideas in the deeper sense -- major changes in the personality of sound.
a related reader comment
another reader comment
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No apology to pop and film
By
Andrew Druckenbrod
posted @ 07/29/2004 9:26 am
Perhaps because we agree here on the problematic nature of this blog’s posited question (and critics can’t stand to agree for too long!), the thrust of this debate has shifted from what is the next big idea for classical music to how it interacts with culture’s big ideas/movements. These are clearly two different concerns, and the latter is much more interesting, I think.
I'd argue that many of the big art musical ideas of the past had less to do with cultural trends, certainly less that the representational and literal art forms of theater, art and literature did. It’s not surprising that Greg would find more relevance from film, a two-dimensional imitation of reality. Nor is it surprising that popular music, with its weight on lyrics, would give us, “the big, scene-setting ideas in music of the last thirty or forty years” as Alex Ross puts it.
Up-to-the-minute cultural relevance is not exactly what art music has been about. The meaning of tones and pure sound -- the realm of most art music -- is slippery. It’s not clear that the average 19th-century concert-goer or nobleman “got” or that Beethoven wanted them to get that he used sonata form (if they even knew what that was) to show the Romantic ideal of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity in a piece like Symphony No. 5. That despite the fact that its transformation from C minor to major, and the pitfalls therein, is as obvious as a road map to us now. (And this was in the height of music’s ascendance and perception as an art form.) Likewise, it is safe to say that the folk song “L’homme arme” was more a reflection on culture to the medieval masses than the many masses that subsequently incorporated it.
To second Justin, art music’s interest compared to pop is not to be negated just because it might occasionally lag behind in cultural relevance – especially since quite often art music is as germane, it is just not as disseminated.
Actually, art music has often connected with the times for me, whether through a piece by Randy Woolf or John Adams or whomever, but am I to discount this because tens of thousands of other people haven’t shared that experience? To view classical music as lacking compared to pop and film because it doesn’t obviously interact with the (wholly problematic) zeitgeist or do so in great numbers is to somewhat misunderstand music’s perception/role/existence throughout the years.
Listening to classical music is often such a personal experience, and the meaning so intimate even when hearing it en masse at a concert, that it doesn’t usually affect two people the same way. I love that, though! I don’t want everything I see and hear to be interpreted the same by everyone who sees it or hears it. I always am suspicious of mass opinion, and art music -- especially when live -- allows for a privacy of experience and individuality of response that much film and pop (both of which I love) often don’t.
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Gender footnote
By
Anne Midgette
posted @ 07/29/2004 9:07 am
Since Scott brought up the | |
