They noted that there were certain things which were impermanent and other things to which the word impermanence did not apply. – Perfect Lives

I spent June composing and July writing a book. Both are enjoyable and self-fulfilling activities; I am fortunate. The first feels like I’m taking care of myself and developing psychically, putting myself first; the second feels like I’m adding to my authority and piling up ammunition for future writing and debate. It saddens me that the book feels like so much more solid an achievement. The music might never get played, it might get played badly, there might not be a recording, people might not like it or not get it, it may disappear into the ether. The book, being from an academic press, will go into 500 libraries automatically and sit there on the shelves waiting to be tripped over. It will be used by other researchers and quoted in other books. Every time I open the book, it will read just as eloquently as the first time; the music, I’ll have to worry again about every new performance, whether it will go well and sound good. Physically, the result of my composing will mainly be a PDF out on the internet. If I’m lucky and find some money, a compact disc may result, which feels a little bit like a book, but doesn’t get distributed as well. CDs seem to disappear, whereas when I go to friends’ houses, I notice my books sitting on their shelves. Books impress my employers, which my un-prize-winning music doesn’t, and the books bring me lecture gigs, which my music rarely does. (Economically, oddly enough, they’re about the same: I’ve made more money from music commissions than book advances, but the quarterly drip of book royalties offsets that.) After Music Downtown I thought I might not write any more books and just focus on my music from now on, which sounded great. I could do that. But I got seduced back into books as a much easier path toward the appearance of achievement. I could have written all my music and still not be taken seriously by a wide variety of people, but the books (peer-reviewed, published at someone’s expense, permanent, not misunderstandable) give me a kind of irrefutable clout that I can’t deny enjoying. And now I have three more books I’m thinking of working on down the road.

This unparaphraseable self-dialogue from Atalanta illustrates something of what I love so much about Robert Ashley’s music:

I said, “Is the struggle with the law manifested in every
aspect of the making of music, or are there law-abiding aspects and others that
are confrontational only because of indiscretion on the musician’s part –
because of a transgression?”

He said to me, “Music is the enactment of the manifestation
of the struggle with the law on a scale of continuous attempts; that is, where
the attempts are related to each other symbolically through a pattern imposed
on our memory. Music is a history of our struggle with the law.”

I said, “Can music, then, substitute itself for the
enactment of the struggle in other parts of our lives?”

He said to me, “That is its most common use.”

I said, “The musician, then, becomes socially symbolic,
enacting restlessness.”

He said to me, “Yes. In order to be law-abiding, there has
to be a place where one can rest. One can be law-abiding only in safety from
the law.”

I said, “Is the listener different from the musician?”

He said to me, “Yes, that is the paradox of music. In
listening to music we are observing other persons like ourselves, but the
consequences of their actions do not accrue to us actually. Their actions are
understood only in retrospect. The consequences may accrue to us as wisdom. May
even endanger our relationship to the law, may change our minds, but for the
listener the act has already come into existence before the law is recognized.
The listener is in safety from the law.”

UPDATE: Notice how subtly and beautifully it nuances the tone that he uses “He said to me” rather than simply, “He said.” The man’s a frickin’ poet.

In an interview on Slate, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger (who left the organization) confirms the very reasons I quit having anything to do with the web site:

Q. Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

A. Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject–that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn’t have any respect for those who make it their
lives’ work to know things.

Q. Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It’s seems odd to be committed to a project that’s all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who’ve worked
so hard to acquire it.

A. There’s a whole worldview that’s shared by many programmers–although not all of them, of course–and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as “epistemic egalitarianism.” They’re greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else….

And later, just as accurately:

This is a general problem with Wikipedia: What is praised as consensus decision-making or crowd-sourcing often just means that the person with the loudest voice or the most time on his or her hands is the one who’s going to win.

We live eight miles from where Chelsea Clinton is getting married this weekend. I walked into my local copy shop, and Jerry asked, “Have you gotten your invitation to the big wedding yet?” I said, “Mine must have gotten stuck in the mail, it hasn’t arrived.” Jerry said, “Yeah, it’s probably sitting next to mine.” No boats are allowed to sail in this stretch of the Hudson for the weekend. The biplanes at the Aerodrome, a popular local attraction, are grounded for the duration. The fairgrounds have been emptied out, because that’s where the helicopters are landing. Two extra sheriffs have been hired, apparently at taxpayer expense. The Clintons are staying with a rich family whose name adorns one of Bard’s most expensive buildings. Residents are pretty much warned to stay away from the town this weekend. The rehearsal dinner is rumored to be taking place at my favorite local restaurant, a joint too pricey for me to dine at except on celebratory occasions. If by any chance Chelsea is a reader of this blog, I highly recommend the macadamia-nut tempura calamari and the garlic soup. They’re fantastic. And mazel tov.

Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Atalanta is actually three operas: one about the painter Max Ernst (uncle of Bob’s wife), one about the jazz pianist Bud Powell, and one about Bob’s uncle Willard Reynolds, the family story-teller and, as Bob calls him, shaman. Any given performance is made up of one act about each hero, and the acts are interchangeable, so one performance will contain one set of stories and the next night a different set of stories. As Bob writes in his “Future of Music” lecture, 

At the opera I am transported to a place and time
where there is no disorder. There is disorder on stage, and it is called
melodrama. We don’t believe it. This is important: that we don’t believe it. We
do believe… what happens in the movies…. Therefore, opera can have no plot. It
is foolish to argue that opera – any opera – can have a plot; that is, that the
“characters” and their apparent “actions” and the apparent “consequences” are
related in any way. Opera can be story-telling only. That the story-telling
happens on stage and that musicians are making music in the pit (to reinforce
the story told) is entirely coincidental. The story might as well be told at
the kitchen table with a crazy aunt and uncle as the soprano and tenor.

1. Homo agens: man acting, or in conflict (Allegro)
2. Homo sapiens: man thinking (Adagio)
3. Homo ludens: man playing (Scherzo), and 
4. Homo communis: man in the community (Allegro)

Homo agens: Improvement: Don Leaves Linda - Linda in conflict and acting to ensure her own safety

Homo
sapiens: eL/Aficionado,
the Agent looking back and trying to reconcile his experiences

Homo
ludens: Foreign Experiences, Don Jr. having wild rides with an Indian guide in his imagination

Homo
communis: Now Eleanor’s Idea, Now Eleanor finding her destiny within the Lowrider community

In the penultimate scene of Robert Ashley’s Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, Linda keeps singing about “Twenty-eight million, two hundred and seventy-eight thousand, four hundred and sixty-six people….” That’s 28,278,466. So I Google the number. I pull up a hundred random sites, invoice numbers, auction IDs, and so on. And there on page three I see the name: “Blue” Gene Tyranny. And “Blue” Gene has written an article in which he mentions Ashley’s early ONCE festival piece Public Opinion Descends Upon the Demonstrators, in which sounds from the audience are amplified. There are six different versions of that piece, depending on the size of the audience. The smallest version is for 6 people in the audience, and, as “Blue” Gene notes, the largest is for 28,278,466 audience members or more. And the first words of Act II of Improvement are: “This act is about – uhn – public opinion.” Turns out for Ashley 28,278,466 somehow symbolizes the end of the world, but he doesn’t remember how he arrived at it. (I’ll spare you the speculation: 28,278,466 factors out to only three prime numbers, 2 x 1097 x 12,889. I couldn’t have figured that out without “factoring large numbers” sites on the internet. And it’s not in the Fibonacci series.)

A dutiful part of my research on Ashley has involved listening to music by his composition teachers, Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, and Wallingford Riegger. For the most part, it is well-crafted, relentlessly earnest, dour, unpersonable music, much of it for string quartet or quintet. I was glad to get that part over with. And then I run into Ashley’s own characterization, in an unpublished but wonderful lecture he gave at UCSD in 2000:

…I like dance music. I like America. I like our innocent people. I am one of them. But I have come to like, as well, another kind of music, which is in conflict, I discover, with the idea of music as something to dance to. I have come to like a new kind of “devotional” music, which has moved out of the churches into some unlocated, secular place. I say “devotional,” because I don’t know a better word, but it is music to be listened to, not danced to. In the listening it takes you to some place you have never been. It is mental. It doesn’t require head-nodding. You just sit there and it flows through you and changes you.

I have brought up this point of the difference between dance music (music to be danced to) and “devotional” music (for want of a better word), because Americans keep trying to arrive at some sort of “compromise.” Check out the term, “accessible.” It almost invariably means the music has a “beat.” I don’t think there is any reason music has to have a beat, unless you are going to dance to it. That is a pleasant aspect of some music. I do it myself. But unfamiliar music that doesn’t have a beat is being discriminated against. The composer knows this. And so the composer is always trying to compromise….

There was a brief few decades, early in the century, when the better-off went to Europe (Germany, in particular) to catch up with non-dance music. Charles Ives didn’t go. But everybody else went. They brought back imitation German music. It was good in Germany, but here it was imitation. Then, in this “serious” music there was a brief flirtation with jazz, which mostly came to nothing, because the black people were better at jazz. And black people could not make “serious” music, because they were oppressed. Then (this is a chronology) there came American-Serious-Music. It was taught in the conservatories. Every music school had a Resident String Quartet (the cheapest form of ensemble), a Graduate Student String Quartet, and numberless Undergraduate String Quartets. They played American-Serious-Music. The string quartet was the university computer-music-studio of the 1940s and 1950s… It is a characteristic of the string quartet to emphasize moving the bow back and forth. The more the better.

Insert: Mr. Arditti, of string quartet fame, complained to Alvin Lucier, in the presence of a large number of people, that he didn’t like to play Alvin’s String Quartet, because there was very little bow movement, which lack of bow movement made his arm tired. To which Alvin replied, “Why don’t you play it with the other arm?”

American-Serious-Music became a matter of moving the bow back and forth as much as possible, with accents here and there. You might call it sawing. One of its foremost practitioners called the style, “motor-rhythmic.” It is characterized by a continuous sawing of sixteenth-notes or eighth-notes (depending on the time signature and the tempo). Up-bow, down-bow, up-bow, down-bow, endlessly. You know what i mean. This is where I came in. I went to music school. I hated “motor rhythms.” Gradually I came to hate string quartets, when they got into that sawing, because that relentless sawing was simply a senseless update of the circle-dances that those innocent people had brought with them to America…. Everything about “motor rhythms” was just another version of the polka, the hora, and whatever else the dances were called wherever they came from. A circle of mostly poor people holding hands and jumping up and down. A long way from Morton Feldman. And I didn’t even know Morton Feldman existed.

I print this here because I think it’s wonderful reading, wonderfully put, and an insightful reading of the times. This is not to say I would have said everything he says the way he says it – I have my own thoughts about what “accessibility” means – but, as usual, I can’t argue with him. He’s a brilliant writer, which has not yet been acknowledged much – so brilliant that even his prose is nearly impossible to paraphrase, so that I end up quoting larger chunks than I’d like to get away with. American-Serious-Music: I know the genre well, and it’s a good term for it. We still have a lot of it around.

I keep running into evidence that musicians have never heard of Ashley. (For instance, last night Bill Duckworth told me his interview with Ashley got axed from his Talking Music book because the editor had never heard of him.) This flummoxes me. Ashley has been at the center of my musical focus since I was in high school in the early ’70s. When we brought him to New Music America in 1982, he was our number-two celebrity, after only John Cage – and much of his best music hadn’t even been written yet. In those days I didn’t have a musician friend who wasn’t into him. I would have easily said he was as famous as Stockhausen. I can only gather that Stockhausen continues to get taught in music departments, and Ashley doesn’t – partly because his insights, such as those above, don’t sit well in those music departments. My book will make the strongest attack on that problem that I’m capable of. I am finding that to really get into some of Ashley’s works I have to go through the text pretty thoroughly – especially true of Foreign Experiences and Now Eleanor’s Idea. It’s a lot less work than reading analyses of Gruppen and Le Marteau, and repays the effort.

Here’s an author’s query for you. One of Robert Ashley’s biggest influences in college was a piano teacher named Mary S. Fishburne. She was listed, with an M. Mus., as Assistant Professor of Music in the Univ. of Michigan catalogue from 1949 to 1956, at which point she vanishes from history. I can’t find any details about her. If anyone (among my older readers, presumably) has heard of her and has any idea what happened to her, I’d love to hear about it.

On an Overgrown Path has put up a flattering piece pairing me with Gustav Holst on account of our shared astrological concerns. Even nicer, this Sunday (our Independence Day on this side of the Pond) host Bob Shingleton is going to present a radio show comparing four of Holst’s Planets with the same four of mine – and, in a gentlemanly touch, he is leveling the playing field by playing Holst’s not in the usual technicolor large orchestra version, but in a rare two-piano version (that I’d love to hear). Holst strikes me as having been a nice man, and I think he would have welcomed the friendly competition from a little-known newcomer.

When school ended I had been asked for new pieces by three people, and I have now finished two and a half of them. This morning I put the final touches on a piece for viola and piano, Scene from a Marriage, for my Bard colleague, violist Marka Gustavsson. I also completed, this afternoon, a tentative first draft for a 25-minute string quartet in one movement, titled The Summer Land of Time, for a concert Carson Cooman is organizing at Harvard. And yesterday I reached the halfway point in a new piano piece. It’s 38 minutes of music since the last week of May, which amazes me because when I was young I was such a damnably slow composer. 

In my recent post How to Care How It Was Made, I did not at all mean to invoke, as a
couple of commenters suggest I did, the old canard about serial music and
chance music being indistinguishable. Boulez, in his letters to Cage,
absolutely rejected chance as a legitimate musical technique. I find it odd
that, having said so so stridently, he was at that very time using pitch techniques that were
theoretically just as groundless and arbitrary. This does not mean that I think
Le Marteau
sounds like chance music, nor that it sounds like Cage. The wonderful thing
about Cage works like, say, Music of Changes and Four for string quartet is that
they do sound something like imagined nature, with so much unpredictable
variety in every parameter (nothing is excluded, even triads can appear
fortuitously). Le Marteau’s
rhythms and timbres and textures sound completely busy and purposeful – it’s the pitch
language that seems literally meaningless, and I am hardly alone in this
opinion. In this respect, one could argue that what Boulez said about Schoenberg in his article
“Schoenberg est Mort” of the previous year is equally true of Boulez in Le
Marteau:
that there’s a conceptual mismatch between his rhythmic profile and his pitch
profile. (It strikes me that Boulez never made that mistake again.)

[UPDATE: Carson Cooman points out that when I interviewed Boulez and mentioned Nancarrow, he said that Nancarrow’s rhythm was extremely sophisticated, but that “the pitch language doesn’t follow.” Sounds like a theme.]

A
fellow graduate student of mine at Northwestern did her master’s thesis or
doctoral dissertation on precisely the supposed aural equivalence of serialism
and chance music. In the course of it, she performed a demonstration in which
she played ten musical examples, half of serialism and half of chance music
(Cage and Xenakis, I think, exemplifying the chance half), and challenged us,
her fellow grad students, to guess which were which. Had we gotten half of them wrong, that would have confirmed her thesis. I not only got
nine of the ten examples right, I identified the composers correctly. (The remaining example was a poor recording.) Serialism
and chance music are abstractions that are not independent of the composers in
whose styles they are embodied. To pretend that one could compare generic serialism, per
se, with generic chance music, per se, is to blunder into a syllogism. To defend the point, one
would have to be able to compare a chance piece by Boulez or Babbitt with a serialist
piece by Cage, which is, of course, impossible. Not only do Cage and Xenakis
sound (even in excerpts of a few measures at a time) different from Boulez and Babbitt, Cage doesn’t sound like Xenakis, and Boulez doesn’t sound like Babbitt. For all its continuing popularity as a historical concept, the
supposed perceptual equivalence of serialism and chance music had a grain of
truth to it, but one, I thought, that was infertile, and from which nothing
important ever grew.

I just learned that the final movement of my Implausible Sketches for two pianos, “Don’t Touch My Pint,” received its world premiere in Belgrade on May 23, by students of pianist Nada Kolundzija. Other composers on the concert: Glass, Cowell, Cage, Reich, Ligeti, Pärt, Nyman, Dusan Bogdanovic, Marjan Mozetich, and Milos Raickovic. Nada had mentioned the possibility to me, but I had no idea it had happened. “Don’t Touch My Pint” is based throughout on a 5-against-4 rhythm, which explains the title. 

I mentioned that I find myself working Sudoku puzzles lately. My other spare-time hobby, relentless nerd that I am, is analyzing the 12-tone pieces I’m using for my 12-tone analysis class in the fall. The two activities – tone-row searching and Sudoku – are kind of alarmingly similar, so much so that I can forget at times which I’m doing. (Is that “aggregate” filled up yet? Am I looking for 12 of something, or 9 of something?) I do like understanding things, though, so that I get a real childlike kick out of teasing out the structure of a piece I’ve been listening to for decades. In other words it’s more like summer fun for me than it would be, I imagine, for most people.

I’m also honing in on the repertoire for the course. Looking for Schoenberg 12-tone pieces I can stomach, I’ve come up with the Waltz, Op. 23 No. 5, the first 12-tone piece he published, with a row that never transposes; the Op. 24 Serenade sonnet with the 11-syllable lines that go out of phase with the row; and the magnificent first scene of Moses und Aron. For Webern I am almost criterion-less, because they all make the same point, and I already use my favorites – Opp. 21, 27, and 29 – in other courses. Using the Concerto feels like such a cliché, but I guess my students need to know the clichés. I’m afraid I’m at the point of dropping poor Aaron Copland from the list. Connotations and Inscape are big, unwieldy pieces, and I just don’t think they’re that good, and I don’t want to end up weakly defending them. Copland’s imagination seemed constrained by the technique. If I’m going to venture into a large orchestral work (in addition to Sinfonia), I’d much rather use Rochberg’s Second Symphony, which is the most exciting, memorable, and followable orchestral 12-tone work by any American I know of – also more to my taste, frankly, than anything the Second Vienna School ever produced. I’m already using Rochberg’s Serenata d’Estate, which has been fun to take apart.

I have to do much of this at the beginning of the summer, because I need to order scores for students, and I have to make sure I don’t get in over my head. I don’t want to omit Boulez, and I’ll attempt Le Marteau rather than more attractive examples only because there’s a published analysis. Yes, I’m slowly working my way through Lev Koblyakov’s oddly titled Pierre Boulez: A World of Harmony, a stunning work of analysis, and an equally stunning piece of dismal writing. If he could have stuck with even one musical passage long enough to show how Boulez derived it from beginning to end, it would be immensely more illuminating, but instead he goes concept by concept and jumps all over the piece with each new concept. He’s certainly concise – too much so, in fact – and I admire his achievement, but he could have made his findings infinitely easier to digest.

(Time magazine hasn’t yet added it to their online archive, but I clearly remember around 1980 when they ran an article breaking the news that a music-analyst, Koblyakov, had cracked the code to Le marteau. Amazing to think that mainstream media actually cared about such things a mere 30 years ago.)

Nevertheless, I get that Boulez divides up his row into five segments in five possible ways based on a rotating number series:

and so on. I also get that he “multiplies” each of those five segments by all five of them to build up derived unordered pitch sets – the process of “chord multiplication” being to transpose one chord to all the pitches of the other chord and add all the pitches together. And you can see how (if you take the trouble) each gesture is drawn from the pitches of these chord-multiplication products:

I also get how Boulez chose the order of chord multiples by making little diagonal patterns through his chart of available sets. Sounds like fun.

Well, that’s great, sir, you’re a Lebowski, I’m a Lebowski. What I can’t see is why this method of generating pitches has any significant advantage over Cage’s chance processes, which Boulez so vehemently rejected. I can’t see what they have to do with the ostensive unifying purpose of the 12-tone row, and since Boulez plays around within them as unordered collections, plus has two of them going at any given time in extremely rapid succession (any one collection rarely occupying more than two beats at quarter = 168), I can’t see what purpose this incredibly convoluted process serves in the least. Stephen Heinemann in “Pitch-Class Set Multiplication in Theory and Practice” (Music Theory Spectrum Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 1998) promises to reveal a “process-based listening strategy” for Le Marteau based on all this, but by the time one’s waded through all his math, the results aren’t much. He shows how in “Domain 5” (one of the five harmonic areas) a certain octatonic partitioning tends to occur, but then writes

the other domains do not parse as easily as Domain 5, and… such an analytical approach is not without its obstacles. The aural “processing” in terms of interval class 3 and octatonic structuring is complicated… by the sheer rapidity of change…

If this is the best assurance we can get from someone who understands Le Marteau well enough to correct Koblyakov’s misconceptions about it, I’m ready to give up on anyone ever making detailed aural sense of the piece. As Fred Lerdahl famously wrote (and Taruskin quotes it in his history),<

Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maitre (1954) was widely hailed as a masterpiece of post-war serialism. Yet nobody could figure out, much less hear, how the piece was serial. From hints in Boulez (1963), Koblyakov (1977) at last determined that it was indeed serial, though in an idiosyncratic way. In the interim, listeners made what sense they could of the piece in ways unrelated to its construction. Nor has Koblyakov’s decipherment subsequently changed how the piece is heard…. The serial organization of Le Marteau> would appear, 30 years later, to be irrelevant. The story is, or should be, disturbing. (“Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in Generative Processes in Music, Oxford, 1988)

I agree. I’m disturbed by it. And yet…

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

– and yet, just as I couldn’t decipher Le Marteau on my own without Koblyakov’s almost grudging help, neither had I been able to tease any detailed sense out of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles before Joseph Straus’s Stravinsky’s Late Music appeared. (Koblyakov proudly asserts that he analyzed Le Marteau without seeing Boulez’s sketches, which are apparently lost, but I gather Straus had access to Stravinsky’s notes.) In my youth I struggled vainly to relate the luscious quadruple flute chords from the Interlude (so proto-Feldmanesque, although Feldman was already doing similar things) to any kind of pitch order drawn from the first movement:

What a relief it was to learn that the chords are drawn from the first two-note columns in an array of four rows, prime, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion:

And, going on, the two chords in the fifth measure are drawn from columns 3 and 4, respectively. The relationship of this fat A-flat 9 chord, drawn from two notes each from four different row forms, with duplications, to any sense of this work’s 12-tone content is just as tenuous as the order of Boulez’s chord multiplications. Here and elsewhere, it’s almost like Stravinsky wrote out his row forms in some interesting logical order and then just glanced around for groups of pitches he liked that happened to be adjacent on the page. Of course, that gorgeous chord locked in the choice of other chords following it, quasi-randomly determined, with little musical function of their own but to resolve back to the initial one. The approach seems more charmingly intuitive, almost accidental or even opportunistic, than theoretical. I’m reminded of Bill Duckworth’s piece from the 1970s Pitch City, in which the players are given a map for improvising their way through a row matrix.

(I was also amused to read in Straus’s book about Boulez’s and Stravinsky’s relationship. Despite the flattering interest Stravinsky showed in the young Boulez, Boulez led a disastrous 1958 performance of Stravinsky’s Threni, and frequently made public his contempt for all of Stravinsky’s post-1923 music. In 1970 Stravinsky said, “I have not had any contact with M. Boulez myself since, shortly after visiting me in Hollywood three years ago, he talked about my latest compositions… with unforgivable condescension, then went on to play them at a prestigious concert in Edinburgh. This was not the first proof of disingenuousness I had had of that arch-careerist, but it will be the last in which I have any personal connection.” (Stravinsky’s Late Music, p. 34, n. 66) I’m not sure “arch-careerist” is the precise term for someone who bites the hand that could feed him, but I do feel certain that, even with my stunted sense of political advantage-taking, I would have returned the solicitations of Igor Stravinsky more graciously than that.)

In neither the case of Le Marteau nor Requiem Canticles does the technique seem to have any perceptible relation to the unifying idea of a 12-tone row. In the case of Requiem Canticles, though, it doesn’t matter to me, because I’ve always loved the piece and I always will; it and Threni are among my favorite Stravinsky works, which I guess makes me a pretty rare breed of Stravinsky fan. (Straus goes concept-by-concept too, but with his broad hints I’ve been able to trace the rows through half of Threni.) I’m curious to find out how Requiem Canticles was composed, but the knowledge won’t influence the way I listen to it, and I didn’t care what the process “turned out” to be. In Le Marteau‘s case, however, I have always been baffled by the music, was never able to learn to love it or even like it or remember any of it, and finding out what total disregard for perceptibility it was written with is more likely to reinforce my dismissive attitude toward it than to make me listen more sympathetically. (I’m with this guy.) And yet I do love some of Boulez’s later music, particularly Pli selon pli and Rituel.

Going further into all this is bracing me for the big philosophical question I’m expecting from the students this fall: Why use 12-tone method? What was the point? I don’t expect to have an answer by then. Already when I mentioned in modernism class that some composers deviate from strict use of the row, they became indignant; if you believe in the theory, they said, you should trust it devoutly, and if not you should abandon it. (Young people can afford to be so pure.) The music itself will have to convince them that it’s not so black and white: that the row is sometimes a unifying factor, sometimes a melody, sometimes a note generator, sometimes a pretext, sometimes an ideological weapon, sometimes a bad idea entertained for too long, sometimes even a Rorschach test. But I think I can convince them some beautiful music happened in spite of it, if not always because of it.