Thinking about Anne’s article, referred to (not “referenced,” which isn’t a word) below: I guess what I took most from the Critics Conversation was that music critics and composers have come to live in much more disjunct worlds than I had realized. I sit around with the composers I know and talk about how the big thing today is that minimalism has opened up this new space which allows for new, less European formal ideas, and for exploration of all kinds of tempo complexity, much more audible and meaningful than the old kind – and they nod their heads and say “of course,” as though I were stating that the sky is blue and the grass green. And I say the same thing to critics and they act as though I’m describing some impossible fairyland where the birds have four wings and the rivers run with chocolate milk and maybe they’d better be careful because the voices I’m hearing in my head may direct me to do something violent. I thought, back in the ‘80s, that almost every composer knew a newspaper critic or two, and that despite differences in viewpoint, we were at least dealing with the same reality.

I suppose what happened was that, from the ‘60s on, a new music scene grew up and vastly expanded that has nothing to do with the orchestra world; and arts editors have a way of keeping classical critics focused on the local orchestra. I once applied for a job with the Grand Rapids Press, if you can believe that (this is obviously a very old story), whose arts section had just been placed under the purview of the sports editor. And in my youthful naivete I incensed him by suggesting that there might, on a given week now and then, sometimes be something interesting to write about that would supercede the Grand Rapids orchestra. This was not acceptable. The orchestra’s every performance would be reviewed. So if you’re not writing for orchestra, your name is unlikely to ever float before the faces of most critics – and as John Adams keeps saying, most of the interesting composers are not writing for orchestra. And the critics never realize that most composers inhabit a completely separate reality, because there are a few composers getting played by orchestras, and they see one take a bow from time to time, and they not unnaturally, but wrongly, assume that it’s the best composers who are breaking into the orchestra circuit. So when I say that those visible composers are just the tip of the iceberg and the rest of the iceberg is more interesting, they think I’m totally off my rocker.

Getting the critics to talk to each other was a neat trick. Maybe we could get the critics and composers to talk to each other – though if you only include the composers of orchestra pieces, you’ll only reinforce the status quo.

My colleague Anne Midgette writes in the Times today about Arts Journal’s Critics Conversation we participated in. And she is kind and careful enough to state my views, and those of others, I thought, with accuracy and nuance. My favorite line: “the future of new music and the future of classical music may not be the same thing at all.” Bingo!

I visited the Village Voice offices today for the first time since the spring, and found a lot of good stuff waiting for me. Perhaps this would be a good forum in which to inform musicians and organizations that I only visit my mailbox at the Voice about twice a year (I’m writing for them less than once a month these days). If you want to send me a press release or CD, e-mail me at kgann@earthlink.net, and I’ll send you a current address. It’s a shame seeing Federal Express packages five months old.

I’m listening to the radio station of my dreams. It’s on the internet, and it’s called Iridian Radio. I swear it sounds like they’re going though my CD collection. They sent me the link this morning and I turned it on and immediately recognized Paul Dresher’s Channels Passing. I left it on and was startled by my friend Eve Beglarian’s voice suddenly coming through my computer in her piece Landscaping for Privacy. I heard Pamela Z before I tuned out, then came back tonight for David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing and a chance to hear the Tin Hat Trio, whose music I’m not very familiar with yet. It’s an all-new-music station, 24/7/52, with no commercials. They even repeat pieces during the day, as AM radio does, and I like it – even in Landscaping for Privacy, which I was familiar with, I heard things the second time tonight that I’d never noticed before. There are no announcements, and to find out what you’re listening to, you have to look at their playlist window, with the result that I’ve been surprised a few times how attractive some pieces are that I had remembered not thinking much of. This is absolutely postclassical radio as I used to dream we might finally have it someday.

Sometimes I get the feeling that maybe I am the only person who really cares about this music – and I got that feeling a couple of weeks ago from the utter indifference to it of the classical critics in the Critics Conversation, and from Rockwell’s impatience that I still even bother to write about this stuff. And then something like Iridian Radio comes along proving that we do have an audience, that we do have a unified and interrelated repertoire, that this stuff is wonderful to sit around and listen to. I’m enjoying Iridian more than any classical station I’ve ever heard.

They’re playing Dan Becker’s Gridlock!

UPDATE: They played Arnold Dreyblatt’s Escalator, and now they’re playing Belinda Reynolds’ Circa. Who’d have ever thought that I’d hear this music on the radio?!

Old, conservative, self-indulgent rationale for ignoring new music, ca. 1954:

”I can’t stand the new music, it’s too dissonant and just not nearly as great as Romantic music.”

New, hip, egalitarian rationale for ignoring new music, ca. 2004:

”I can’t stand the new music, it’s too consonant and just not nearly as great as pop music.”

In the world of music criticism, this passes for… Progress!

Seattle critic Gavin Borchert has a more-original-than-usual view on the death of classical music.

When I was a student at Oberlin, my composition teacher Randolph Coleman used to say that from now on, composers would bloom a lot later than they used to, in their 50s or 60s. He felt that there were so many competing influences on a composer’s musical style that it would take a couple more decades to assimilate them and find your own voice than it used to when everyone grew up in a culture with one dominant kind of music.

At the time, this sort of went over my head, and to the extent I grasped it, it was a depressing pronouncement for a 20-year-old. (I remember defiantly thinking it wouldn’t be true of me.) But now that I’m 48 and have watched a lot careers unfold, I think old Randy might have hit the nail on the head. Partch, who made up his own musical style from bits and pieces of world musics, didn’t really hit his stride until he started adding percussion to his music in his 50s, and he sprang into something like celebrity around age 66. Nancarrow, who combined jazz and Bartok with a new technology, was discovered at 65 and started becoming famous at 70. Lou Harrison, who brought together musics from all continents, was kind of a tangential, eccentric figure for most of my life, then in the 1990s, nearing 80, surprisingly got touted as possibly America’s greatest composer. Robert Ashley, despite some early notoriety, didn’t get started on his seminal work Perfect Lives until age 48, and he’s now, at 73, in his most fertile period – best opera composer of our era and still almost unknown to classical audiences. We think these people are the oddballs, the eccentrics. They might have simply been first of a new breed. They may represent, instead, the composer career trajectory of the future.

When you grow up surrounded completely by music in one style, becoming a child prodigy isn’t so unusual – a sensitive kid can quickly master a clear, finite set of rules. The ubiquity of classical, modern, jazz, pop, and other musics offers a paralyzing panoply of choices. We don’t have much of a record of composers becoming well known in their 20s or 30s lately. For the few who have done so, it usually seems due more to marketing and PR than sterling quality of music. The British keep force-blooming their 20-something-year-old composers, to later embarrassing results.

One characteristic of the Critics Conversation we had here on Arts Journal lately was, amidst lots of drawing on various historical analogies, a pervasive assumption that composers who are really good are bound to take the classical music world by storm in their 30s or 40s. The fact that almost no one is doing so is, to them, evidence that music isn’t doing very well, that there are no good composing ideas around at the moment. Personally, I have CD cabinets and file cabinets full of evidence that we’re in a very exciting time compositionally, with plenty of good ideas and beautiful music. (Since none of the classical critics listen to me, I have to conclude that they’ve all written me off as having no musical taste whatever.) But it may be true that the composers I follow are in a phase analogous to Partch in the ‘50s, or Ashley in the ‘70s, doing interesting work that hasn’t quite gelled enough for public consumption.

Likewise, to quote Wordsworth for the 50th time: “The authentic poet must create the taste by which he is to be appreciated.” When Morton Feldman died at 61, the classical music world had barely given him the time of day. In the next ten years, he became a very big deal indeed. Maybe it not only takes decades for composers to assimilate and master the influences they draw from now, but longer for audiences to assimilate a composer’s life’s work – and with the number of composers around, no one receives any very big chunk of an audience’s time. It won’t surprise me if, as we grow older, a lot of my contemporaries begin hitting their stride, and get revealed as more important figures than anyone had thought. And maybe we should not assume that any archetypes in the history of music are invariable, but make allowances for what may be a fairly new (though not unprecedented) pattern in human creativity.

I write a lot of program notes these days – my work as a classical music annotator is replacing my work as a critic, strangely enough. And in the vast repetitiveness of what people say about classical music, you realize that the lives of the Great Composers are myths, bedtime stories that we tell ourselves to stabilize a certain sanitized, comfortingly simple view of the world. Nadazhda von Meck’s cutting off of patronage to Tchaikovsky in 1890 was one of the crushing blows of his life. Beethoven’s letter to the “Immortal Beloved” brought about a creative crisis and made him realize he would never find happiness with a woman. Sibelius’s involvement in the pro-Finnish language movement wrested him stylistically away from the Germanic composing style. Told that his First Sonata sounded like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Brahms responded haughtily, “Any jackass can see that.”

All probably true enough, I suppose. The books can only report what the primary documents say. But you can’t read virtually the same words, the same phrases, over and over in so many reference books and biographies without beginning to think of these as folk tales developed from writer to writer over the decades – and suspecting that some more subtle truth has escaped us. The artist’s psychological life is not so simple that a few phrases repetitiously used are enough to capture it for eternity. I always wonder how Brahms really said, “Any jackass can see that” – angrily? embarrassed? guiltily? good-humored? We are given the mythic assumption that it was a trivial comment to make to a Great Man, but Brahms was young and just as subject to the anxiety of influence as any of us.

Carl Maria von Weber, hearing the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, declared that the composer was now “ripe for the madhouse.” You’d think that more than a few people in the history of the world had been declared ripe for the madhouse. But Google those four words, and you will find 32 uses on the internet. 31 of them refer to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. And everyone quotes them – including me.

Composer and loyal correspondent Lawrence Dillon has a formulation for the true relationship of composition and theory that is too admirable to keep to myself:

You can drive the car; you can look under the hood; but don’t try to do both at the same time.

Music theory blogging – the continuation of a Critics’ Conversation by other means! DePauw University music professor Scott Spiegelberg has posted a feisty but thoughtful reply to the views I quoted from Jean Lawton and Adam Baratz.

Reader Adam Baratz objects reasonably to my position on terminology:

I see where you’re coming from on promoting the use of grouping music based on surface similarities, but I think such a course is eventually as dangerous to criticism and history as falling back on abstract, inaudible relationships. Just as it’s easy to avoid the emotional meaning of a piece of music through a cerebral system, examining music through arbitrary stylistic groupings can get you into just as many problems….

You can get into all the ideological arguments you want about Babbitt et al, but it strikes me as being more productive to engage them on what’s inside their music. It’s all well and good that Babbitt achieved total serialization or successfully integrated live voice with tape, but Three Compositions for Piano is bland, and Philomel is downright cheesy….

Being able to fully articulate your emotional response to a piece of music helps you to fully understand it. Stopping at one word descriptions like “fluffy” and “soft,” or “minimalist” and “impressionist,” don’t do very much to help you understand what the composer set out to do. The emotional choices made by a composer are just as important, if not more so, than any intellectual ones, and deserve to be criticized and questioned much more than they have in the past.

I see the point, and agree with it. I don’t think anyone reading my reviews would accuse me of stopping with one-word descriptions (over-conciseness is hardly my vice). I make these same distinctions between Babbitt’s pieces, and I’ve expended a lot of print talking about how different the various postminimalist composers are from each other. But if I can call a piece “postminimalist,” and you know what I mean, that saves me a paragraph’s worth of dry technical description and a couple of sentences about history, and allows me to spend my column inches talking about that piece’s specific emotional characteristics. Otherwise, critics have to reinvent the wheel over and over, cataloguing superficial characteristics that hundreds of pieces have in common – which is what often happens in criticism of new music. Imagine having to re-explain sonata form for every Mozart piece you write about.

Let’s say there are 1800 pieces of music out there that one could call postminimalist. (Given that I can name 60 postminimalist composers off the top of my head, it’s undoubtedly a low estimate.) Now, I can listen to, say, Cover by Belinda Reynolds and Fade by Dan Becker, and tell you that, while both pieces basically come from a postminimalist orientation, Cover has more of a classical chamber music patina about it, and a well-calculated, surprising way of never using the same kind of modulation twice; while Fade moves more smoothly and intuitively and mysteriously, hiding its modulations and yet following a concealed repeated pattern. (I choose these examples as a joke, because Becker and Reynolds are married to each other, and the pieces are about as similar to each other as two pieces by different good composers can be – which is not very similar.)

But let’s take the music critic for the Bucksnort Daily Picayune, who’s hearing postminimalist music for the first time in his life. He hears Fade, and writes, “Well, I don’t know, the piece is really limited harmonically, and never departs from the same pulse all the way through. It seems awfully constricted and doesn’t really go anywhere.” He’s not really criticizing Fade, he’s criticizing postminimalism as a style, unaware that there are 1799 other pieces about which he could say the same thing, and that Becker is deliberately starting from the same aesthetic principles as 60 other composers, pulling the postminimalist idea in his own original direction. He’s damned the whole group, but he hasn’t said anything about Becker’s imagination.

This is what happens to composers vis-a-vis critics all the time. You’re involved in a whole scene, you’re developing ideas within a context, but so few critics have heard any wide sampling of that music that with every performance you have to refight the battle on behalf of the entire group. Now, OF COURSE (before everyone writes in, and please notice this sentence) a piece has to be successful on its own terms, and Fade has to overwhelm the listener with beauty regardless of whether those 1799 other pieces exist or not. But music is almost always in the position of relying on at least some minor recognition of its basic language. At some point, say in 1835, there must have been a critic who’d never heard a piece that wasn’t in sonata form, and who heard Schumann’s Papillons and complained, “Geez [or ach du lieber], the piece has no overarching structure, the main theme never gets developed, it’s just a bunch of short fragments, who cares?” – unaware that a new, Romantic aesthetic had been growing up around him in which the fragment, the vignette, was becoming a viable new form of expression. Fade can succeed, Fade can fail, but it deserves to be heard in the postminimalist context before it’s reflexively dismissed for its superficial characteristics. (And as Galen Brown pointed out, it’s the superficial attributes that pieces in the same style have in common.)

What almost every non-composing critic misses, with deadening regularity, is that almost no piece of music exists in a vacuum – composers develop musical languages collectively. And if you don’t know the style, the language, the idiom, you’re never going to deeply understand the piece, or understand why the composer made the choices he or she did. It’s as true of Mozart as it is of Belinda Reynolds, and vice versa. Imagine someone who’s never in his life heard a piece of music written before 1950 (not uncommon these days, unfortunately), hearing his first Mozart symphony. How’s he going to decide whether it’s a great Mozart symphony or a mediocre one (since a lot of the early ones aren’t particularly stellar)? He can’t – but if he listens to five more Mozart symphonies, and a couple by Haydn, he’ll start to make distinctions. He’s in the same position the Bucksnort critic is in listening to Fade, and the same position I’m listening to a performance of South Indian classical music – sounds good to me, but I surely couldn’t pinpoint what sparks of genius there are, and I may be overlooking mistakes that would send Ravi Shankar falling off his pillow laughing his head off.

One function of terminology is to make people aware that a style exists. If I’m unaware that a genre called South Indian classical music exists, I may think what I’m hearing is some bizarre anomaly that one person made up to sound weird. With our nominalist shying away from terms and movements, we have a tendency to atomize musical culture these days, consider every piece a bizarre anomaly, which is one reason our musical culture is literally falling apart – because no one will connect the dots.

(I realize I’m beating this terminology shtick to death, and probably even exaggerating its importance – since there are plenty of new pieces that even an up-to-date expert couldn’t assign to any known style. But I’m so sick and tired of this self-defeating, anti-intellectual bias in the new music world that it’s difficult to shut up about it.)

Reader and like-minded spirit Jean Lawton has written a response to my blog entry “Leave No Term Unstoned.” I e-print it here because it’s not just an answer but a beautifully written article, despite the fact that it says a couple of flattering things about me, and because she makes so many points I wish I had made, and supports them so compellingly. Thanks, Jean – for this and for the Wittgenstein line I had already quoted.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What makes a subject difficult to understand… is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand.” [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Section 86, pg. 405 of the “Big Typescript,” von Wright catalogue number 213 ]

Kyle Gann continues to rescue music criticism from the swamp into which the pseudoscience of the set theorists had cast it for nigh on 50 years. Descriptive terms for musical genres prove not only useful but essential. The only alternatives to necessarily vague isms like “impressionism” and minimalism”? Refuse to talk about music at all… or reduce music to equations and logic.

Been there. Done that. Dead end.

Composers often take the former path — “shut up ‘n play yer guitar!” (Frank Zappa). Fun. But unproductive.

A few unaccountably influential pseudoscientists in yakademia from ca. 1950 onward chose the latter, trudging ever deeper into “that Serbonian bog,” as James Clerk Maxwell called it in his 1878 Rede Lecture at Cambridge, “where whole armies of scientific musicians and musical men of science have sunk without filling it up.”

Neither alternative works. So that leaves us with labeling musical genres. That works, because language and music interact in powerful ways. Back in the 1960s, Kenneth Gaburo passed out bowls filled with sand, water, steel bolts, rice, silk. He had composition students close their eyes, stir their fingers around in the bowls, then
compose music based on the sensations. Afterward everyone could instantly identify each composition with each sensation. Simple words like “rough” and “sharp” and “silky” and “liquid” sufficed to accurately describe each composition. More recently, a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour piece showed a class of 4th graders listening to modern
music from the 2000s. The kids instinctively used plain descriptive terms. One said “I like fluffy music.” Language is vague and imprecise, but captures important aspects of the musical experience.

These anecdotes tells us something about the power and value of non-musical ways of being to illuminate music — particularly language. So using (admittedly
nebulous) terms to describe genres remains useful, and more to the point, necessary. Spoken and written language, like music, iridesces and ignites distant meanings by creating a web of associations.

Applied to music, math murders to dissect. Language breathes life into music, or, as the Greeks put it, inspires. Only human language captures the countless microuniverses of sight and sound and touch and taste and smell which music evokes. In language, as in music, context reigns. So using terms for musical genres
works.

Musical Josef Mengeles like Milton Babbitt and Alan Forte and Robert Morris who tried to flense away the ligaments of language, the tendons of cultural connotations, the muscles of synaesthaesia, and all the skin of extra-mathematical supra-logical aspects from music left us with set of bleached bones. The attempt to reduce music to dead math and silent logic yielded unlistenable swill and unreadable jargon.

People talk about music and musical styles using inchoate descriptive terms for reasons which brain science has only recently revealed. For example, the colorful metaphor of pitch “height” actually parallels the hard-wiring of the human auditory cortex. PET scans show that the human brain’s pitch detection apparatus shares brain circuitry with Brodmann’s Area 19 (commonly known as “the mind’s eye” or “the visual theater”). (See http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Music_00.html.) Talking about pitch as “high” or “low” is thus more than vaguely descriptive. It limns the basic neurophysiology of the human brain.

Likewise, we’re now finding that describing musical timbres as “sharp” or “dull” results from similar links to other hard-wired brain structures. [For details, see the article “A Universe of Universals,” Leonard B. Meyer, The Journal of Musicology, Volume XVI, Number 1, Winter 1998, pp. 3-25] Terms describing general musical movements capture important aspects of the experience of listening to that music.

Unlike mathematical equations, which tell us nothing of significance about a musical style or a musical composition, descriptive terms like “minimalism” or “totalism” reveal important facets of these styles.

Minimalism, for instance, typically trades off a reduced pitch set for increased rhythmic complexity. Pieces like Reich’s Piano Phase dial up rhythmic intricacy (way up) while dialing down the number of pitches. “The New Romanticism” typically heads in the other direction, twirling the pitch dial farther toward 11 and punching in the LOUDNESS button for emphasis but punching the MUTE button on rhythmic complexity (compared to Piano Phase, anyway).

Totalists use both techniques, and for obvious reasons. Understandably entranced by the Dedalaean rhythmic labyrinths discovered by Arts Subtilis and rediscovered by Conlon Nancarrow, totalists quickly figured out that complex nested tuplets sound incoherent without a regular rhythmic grid for background. So totalists do both. They ramp up the number of chromatic pitches and the complexity of the rhythm, but also keep a regular rhythm (a la minimalism) with close to zero complexity so you can hear the embedded tuplets offset from a Euclidean grid – as in Michael Gordon’s Yo, Shakespeare! Most important of all, descriptive terms capture the crucial human qualities of the musical styles.

Minimalist music sounds what the name implied – chopped. Channeled. A cholo
lowrider among musical styles. Retro chic, stripped down compared to previous tonal
music, but pumped up with invisible hydraulics under the chassis. Totalist music sounds as the word implies – totalist composers want it all. It pushes forward on both fronts, as though it does want to have its minimalist cake and eat it too. By contrast, the term “set theoretic music” captures none of the crucial human qualities of such music. Instead, we should call set theoretic music like that of Milton Babbitt “sludge-ism.” The music sounds like undifferentiated glop. No perceptible melodies, no functional harmonies, no discernible rhythmic pulse, no audible organization. It sounds like oil looks when it drains out of an engine: dull. Turgid. Undifferentiated. Boring. Tom Johnson even wrote a review in 1976 in which he remarked on how interesting it was that the music sounded so supernally boring.

There’s a solid reason for that. By trying to push rhythmic complexity and pitch complexity and timbral complexity to the max simultaneously, set theoretic atonal music ran afoul of the basic neuro-cognitive constrains of the human nervous system. Faced with information overload, the human brain dumps *all* incoming information. Instead of perceiving complexity, the brain perceives chaos – boring chaos.

Well, music history offers us a kind of chaos. As J. J. Nattiez remarked, “I have said it before and I say it again – there is no progress and no regress in music, only change.” The illusion of progress held sway for a while, but now that illusion has shattered. The Hegelian historicist delusions of the pseudoscientists who envisioned music as an endless upward ramp scaling ever higher levels of harmonic and rhythmic complexity, forever and ever, amen, have collapsed. But now that musical history has fallen off that imaginary upward ramp into the fluctuating steady state prophetically described in Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, The Arts and Ideas (1967),
how to convey the savor and piquancy of the individual fluctuations we call distinct musical styles?

Math fails. The last 50 years of music “theory” prove it, as L. S. Lloyd’s article “Pseudo-Science and Music `Theory'” predicted (Proceedings Of the Royal Academy of Music, 1940). What remains? The delicate glistening web of language, whose ductile threads of meaning retain their freshness even when submerged in the alien ocean of sound. Kudos to Gann for pointing that out. As George Orwell remarked, “It requires an unusual mind to analyze the obvious” – particularly after 50 years of flat-out denial by set theorists like Babbitt.

A reader was kind enough to draw my attention to this wonderful quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein:

What makes a subject difficult to understand – if it is significant, important – is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the intellect, but of the will. [Section 86, pg. 405 of the “Big Typescript,” von Wright catalogue number 213]

Perhaps this explains why no one can understand the simple sentence, “The financial failure of a few orchestras does not equal the death of classical music.” Perhaps this is why the people who were pointing out two years ago that the Iraq War would be a moral and political disaster couldn’t be heard.