Archives for March 2004

Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet? Writing an article and needing a citation from Charles Ives’ Essays Before a Sonata, I put the phrase “the nearer we get to mere expression of emotion” into Google, and it took me straight to the online publication of Ives’s Essays by Project Gutenberg. I’m so happy to have it as a text file on my computer: I’m always quoting it, and having to search for the phrase I want. And carrying it around on my laptop, I remember again the vernacular yet mystical prose style that so thrilled me as a teenager, putting its mark forever on my writing:

On the other hand is not all music, program-music, – is not pure music, so called, representative in its essence? Is it not program-music raised to the nth power or rather reduced to the minus nth power? Where is the line to be drawn between the expression of subjective and objective emotion? It is easier to know what each is than when each becomes what it is. The “Separateness of Art” theory–that art is not life but a reflection of it–“that art is not vital to life but that life is vital to it,” does not help us. Nor does Thoreau who says not that “life is art,” but that “life is an art,” which of course is a different thing than the foregoing. Tolstoi is even more helpless to himself and to us, for he eliminates further. From his definition of art we may learn little more than that a kick in the back is a work of art, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is not. Experiences are passed on from one man to another. Abel knew that. And now we know it. But where is the bridge placed? – at the end of the road or only at the end of our vision? Is it all a bridge?–or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? Suppose that a composer writes a piece of music conscious that he is inspired, say, by witnessing an act of great self-sacrifice–another piece by the contemplation of a certain trait of nobility he perceives in a friend’s character–and another by the sight of a mountain lake under moonlight. The first two, from an inspirational standpoint would naturally seem to come under the subjective and the last under the objective, yet the chances are, there is something of the quality of both in all. There may have been in the first instance physical action so intense or so dramatic in character that the remembrance of it aroused a great deal more objective emotion than the composer was conscious of while writing the music. In the third instance, the music may have been influenced strongly though subconsciously by a vague remembrance of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of a deep religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly came to him upon realizing the beauty of the scene and which overpowered the first sensuous pleasure–perhaps some such feeling as of the conviction of immortality, that Thoreau experienced and tells about in Walden. “I penetrated to those meadows…when the wild river and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead IF they had been slumbering in their graves as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality.” Enthusiasm must permeate it, but what it is that inspires an art-effort is not easily determined much less classified. The word “inspire” is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect. A critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. But that may be a matter of taste–perhaps the most inspired music sounds the least so–to the critic. A true inspiration may lack a true expression unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is not true enough to produce a true expression–(if there be anyone who can definitely determine what a true expression is)–it is not an inspiration at all.

Those words, the words of a true artist-philosopher with an insurance salesman’s knack for persuasion, knock my socks off today as they did when I was 15. How vague, how rambling, how colloquial, how erudite, how deeply thoughtful!

And while we’re at it, I have a query for the masses. A few months ago, I similarly did a search for Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and found all 32 as free PDF files on the internet. Lately I’ve looked again, and they’re gone! All I find is a few million sites trying to sell me scores and recordings. What happened to that wonderful PDF site, where you could refresh your memory about a Beethoven passage from any internet connection? Surely there wasn’t a copyright problem? Does anyone know where it is, or what happened to it?

In case anyone out there in blog land is within driving distance of Santa Fe, NM, I’ll be performing there next weekend. Friday March 12 and Saturday March 13 at 8 PM I’ll be at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail. The box office is at (505) 982-1338. I’ll perform my one-man microtonal music theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull along with a couple of microtonal synthesizer pieces and several of my Disklavier pieces, including the world premier of Petty Larceny – a piece made entirely of quotations from the Beethoven piano sonatas, tempo-shifted so that their harmonies fit together. Come see if my music is as batty as my opinions. (It’s even worse!)

On the second page of Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism are words that, had they been listened to earlier, would have derailed many pointless arguments of my youth:

…it is clearly impossible to bring work with a decidedly socialist or revolutionary content to bear on a mass audience. Access to this audience (the artist’s real means of production) is controlled by the state.

“Access to the mass audience is controlled by the state.” And by “the state” it is now obvious that we mean, not the U.S. Government, but the corporations that own the U.S. Government and the TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations. The corporate state owns access to mass audiences. Why would they freely give that prize over to… living composers? Why would they give it to classical musicians at all? What’s their incentive? The state grants mass-audience access to those who promise to make money for it, to those who will put making money as their top priority, and to those who promise not to contradict the ideology that keeps the corporate state in power. (Howard Stern, a big money-maker in radio, was just yanked from all Clear Channel radio stations for his obscenity – just days after he turned against the Bush administration. Interesting?)

And so all those years of new-music hand-wringing and soul-searching seem silly now. “Why are audiences turning away from classical music?” “Why does no one like our music?” “What can we do to reach out to audiences? Add a backbeat, maybe?” It wasn’t that audiences were turning away: it was that the State was taking over control, an enormous hand slowly turning off the spigot. What seemed like contentious Marxist theory in Cardew’s writings 30 years ago seems like only too obvious fact now.

Benito Mussolini said (and he should know), “Fascism should properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of State and corporate power.” Ever wonder what it was like to live in a Fascist state? Wonder no longer.

Maybe the Web is even God: it does answer prayers. UbuWeb, the fearless site for the history of radical new music, has published as a PDF Cornelius Cardew’s rabble-rousing little 1974 book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, his Maoist/Marxist, over-the-top, but sometimes dead-on critique of the avant-garde. You can get it here, and you should. Just weeks ago I was moaning because I don’t have a copy, and a moment ago I downloaded it onto my computer. (UbuWeb also includes, as introduction, the article I wrote about Cardew for New Music Box, which I don’t think I recall giving them permission for, but never mind: they’ve more than paid me back.)

David Patrick Stearns follows the Master Narrative in his piece on minimalism linked from Arts Journal. Minimalism is a dead style. Never mind that it started evolving into something else in the late 1970s. Never mind that hundreds of composers from Alaska to Florida and from Maine to Mexico have been heavily influenced by it and continue to write music evolved from it. Never mind that several generations of composers now have cited Riley’s In C and Reich’s Come Out as the pieces that first sparked their desire to become composers. Minimalism’s just dead, having left no trace behind, aside from the occasional pathetic wretch who hasn’t heard the news and it still writing it. It is, in fact, the first publicly successful musical style in history to have vanished after only 20 years without leaving the slightest residue. Apparently. According to the Master Narrative.

In response to my “Master Narrative” entry of February 23, Steven Ledbetter sends the following story from his student years in the 1960s, a little long but worth reading to the end. It’s about studying with Gustave Reese, an important scholar who wrote massive standard reference works like Music in the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance:

Gustave Reese was my dissertation adviser and, though he was most famous of course for his books on Medieval and Renaissance music, he was always interested in new music as well, and I ran into him more than once at a concert of recent music.

At one point in class, when the discussion came around to recent trends in music (this was about the time of Carter’s Double Concerto, for example), someone asked him where he thought music was heading.

Reese made the point that the history of music, from at least the 14th century on, has consisted of a series of waves of development in which the style reaches a level of complexity beyond which it seems impossible to go (perhaps for reasons of apparent limits in human perception on the listener’s side or of technical ability on the performers’), and that this “crisis” leads to a radical simplification in one or more elements of music, after which the process begins again.

He was referring (for the late 14th century) to the so-called French “mannerist” composers who made music so rhythmically complex that even modern performers found it challenged them enormously. The reaction to that was the more flowing rhythms of the early Renaissance, and a greater emphasis on the sonority of the “contenance angloise.”

Then during the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, the interaction of more and more polyphonic lines reached a level of complexity such that textures often sounded indifferentiatedly dense, so that one piece ran the risk of sounding like all the others.

The radical change came about with the development of the basso continuo, which allowed virtually all of the contrapuntal lines to be subsumed in a harmonic context over which one or two (normally) melodic lines could be the primary expressive interest, colored by the bass line and harmony.

Another such re-simplification, in this view, occurs in the middle of the 18th century, and leads to the “high classical period” with its balanced phrase structures and architectonic use of harmonic shape.

So when put to the specific question in class about what would happen next in contemporary music, Reese responded, “I have no idea, but I’m sure that it will involve some dramatic simplification, because we seem to have gone about as far as we can on the current track.”

When I first encounted Terry Riley’s “In C,” for example, I though immediately of Reese’s prediction, and I still think that his version of the Master Narrative makes a lot of sense.

Here, from Gustave Reese no less, comes validation for what I’ve been saying for years, and not only about minimalism being a logical next step in the progress of history. If the only music history you know is that from Haydn through Stockhausen, then the death of the orchestra [assuming it is indeed happening, questionable] looks like the end of everything, a mammoth tragedy, a Götterdammerung. But if you know the history of European music from the 11th century on as Reese did (and medieval music was my secondary area of specialization in grad school as well), then you know that there have been many deaths of classical music, many rises and falls of musical institutions, each death preparing the ground for the rise of a new practice. As Nietzsche said, “What is falling, that one should also push.” I’m pleased to learn from Mr. Ledbetter that the world looked much the same to Gustave Reese as it does to me.

That Reese could see the logical necessity of a drastic simplification of music in the 1960s, while a thousand academic composers and music professors continue to rail against it, shows up how little music history most composers know.