The Rock Need Not Return to Earth

The Wolpe newsletter's major offering is a detailed account of the origins of his one Symphony - not one of my favorite Wolpe works, and a little stiff, but the article (without admitting that) explains why: Leonard Bernstein insisted that he greatly simplify the notation, which, originally, was presumably in his usual metrically fluid style. It's difficult to orchestrate goldfish.

My fondness for Wolpe brings up a point about Bernard Holland's bittersweet review yesterday of George Perle's music, whose atonality-bashing will probably earn him another broadside from Counter-Critic (a website that, no longer being a critic, I thoroughly enjoy). I've always sympathized with Holland on this issue, yet I disagree with his terminology. Much of Holland's take is thoroughly common-sensical:

Touché! On the other hand:

Of course, almost no composer is going to accede to this. (In fact, psychological studies have shown that musicians couldn't care less whether a piece comes back to the same key it started in.) Atonality is not the problem. Taking my students as a pristine and unncorrupted audience, there's loads of wonderful atonal music that they glom onto at first listen, and beg for copies of (Ruggles's Sun-Treader, most of Varèse, second movement of Berio's Sinfonia, Stockhausen's Gruppen, much of Nancarrow, Babbitt's Philomel, Xenakis's Pithoprakta, Dallapiccola's Piccola Musica Notturna, Branca's Tenth Symphony), and a lot of atonal music that instantly turns them off (Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet, Webern's Symphony, Babbitt's Post-Partitions). Hell, there's a lot of atonal rock music. 

As Philomel, Sinfonia, Gruppen, and Piccola Musica Notturna show, even 12-tone organization is not the issue. It strikes me that the deciding factor is whether or not the listener senses that there is some organizational factor that you're supposed to be hearing that can't be located by ear, whether the meaning of the piece is buried somewhere underneath the surface. That quality seems to be more what Holland objects to about Perle than the mere lack of tonality. I was dumbfounded by the quotation Alex Ross in his book unearthed from Boulez; asked why the serial pieces of the '50s never became standard repertoire, the meister admitted, "Perhaps we didn't pay enough attention to how people listen." In general, and as evinced by a thousand film scores, atonality tends to express anxiety, and much of the music, like Sun-Treader, that freely acquiesces to that is extremely effective. But Wolpe's output is Exhibit A that music can be relentlessly atonal and also whimsical, jaunty, and attractive. 

Our critics need to find a rhetoric in which to discuss the issue that does not make atonality the fall guy. For a splendid counter-example, I highly recommend Justin Davidson's recent review of Elliott Carter, which elegantly captures, in words I couldn't better myself, my own disappointed feelings about that composer's post-1954 music.