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.

The other day I had lunch with a classical musician friend. She started talking about how sick and tired she is of reading stories about how classical music is dying. What is the purpose of these stories?, she wondered. If a department store found its profits declining and was afraid of going under, would its owners run around shouting to the public that it was in danger of going under? Wouldn’t that shake consumer confidence in the store and make things worse? Wouldn’t that become a self-fulfilling prophecy? We could see how, in private meetings of classical-music performers and managers, you would certainly want to raise any appropriate alarm. But what effect will this continual “Classical music is dying” mantra have on those not involved with classical music in the first place? Won’t they think, “Good, if I wait a little while longer, that’s one more thing I’ll never have to pay attention to”? Wouldn’t the helpful strategy be to talk about what’s wonderful about classical music, about what you can get from it that you can’t from any other music? Given the self-fulfillingly-prophetic nature of the mantra – that those who shout “Classical music is dying!” are increasing and accelerating its likelihood of dying – what do the mantra-shouters get from doing it? What ego strokes from dissing their own artform do these Cassandras receive? Especially when every now and then we find a retailer’s report or audience statistic suggesting that the reports of classical music’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.

Since I couldn’t answer any of these questions (not being one of the mantra-shouters myself), I pass them on to you.

An extremely articulate response to the above post from composer Galen Brown, aptly pointing out that in talking terms we’re talking about superficialities, and that superficialities are indeed wherein works resemble each other:

Since you are expecting unanimous dissent, I feel I ought to make a point of throwing my lot in with the “pro-termists.” You make essentially the same argument I’ve been making for a while now.

Genre naming is useful and relatively harmless if used humanely, by which I mean that people need to recognize the fact that genre naming is based on salient superficialites and behave accordingly. Terms must not be used proscriptively — e.g. I must not say “I want to write X, but as a post-minimalist that route is forbidden to me” and must not be expected to be anywhere close to complete, for reasons that you describe. For instance, Glass and Reich have little in common in their actual compositional techniques, but the salient feature of pulsation and repetition reasonably groups them together. Whether we use a “term” or not I can accurately claim that “if you like Reich, you might also like Glass, or Adams” whereas I would be foolish to claim “If you like Glass you might also like Schoenberg’s serialist period.” We’re psychologically built to make generalizations based on salient superficialities, and to have our preferences, aesthetic and otherwise,
based on those saliencies. It’s silly to refuse to name groupings that we’re using cognitively anyway.

Prefatory note: I’ve always wanted to write an essay on this topic for my blog, so, having the excuse to do so for the Critics’ Conversation, I post it here as well.

“Artists hate terms” is a truism, but not one of the eternal truths of music. It is too often proved false – artists occasionally find terms very useful. Debussy repudiated “Impressionism,” Glass and Reich disavow “Minimalism,” and in the current climate these examples are triumphantly thrown in our face at every turn as though they embody an unalterable principle. But artist George Maciunas coined “Fluxus” (over Yoko Ono’s objections), a group of artists met at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to choose the word “Dada,” Cowell and Antheil embraced “ultramodernism,” Schoenberg plumped for “pantonality” before “atonality” won, and “Minimalism” itself was the coinage of either Michael Nyman or Tom Johnson, both composers who fit the bill. No sooner did “ambient” lose its novel flavor than Paul Miller (or somebody) launched forth with “illbient.” I don’t know who came up with “New York Noise” for free improv of the 1980s, but the improvisers didn’t seem ashamed to wear it.

Terms can be helpful to artists, especially those better remembered for where they were than what they achieved. If I mention Alison Knowles and Yoshi Wada, some of you who don’t know who I’m talking about will instantly place them in an era and milieu if I refer to them as “Fluxus artists.” The smaller the range a term includes, the more evocative it is. “Expressionism” is a vague catch-all, but “Der Blaue Reiter” is intriguing. The “Biedermeier style” so wonderfully connects the figurative inconsistancies of Hummel and Kalkbrenner to the overstuffed furniture of the early 19th-century German middle class, and both to a cartoon. No one can resist referring to Haydn’s “Sturm und Drang” period, and everyone instantly hears what it means in the “Farewell” Symphony. Discontinuities in the application of “Rococo” make it fortunate that we can divide that benighted stylistic era into the “empfindsamer stil” of the Berliners like C.P.E. Bach and the “style galant” of Galuppi and so many others, the latter so sardonically evoked a century later by the “Romantic” Browning:

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,

Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — “Must we die?”

Those commiserating sevenths – “Life might last! we can but try!”

(Browning undoubtedly meant “sixths augmented.”) And if “Ars nova” recurs too often to be helpful, “Ars subtilior” is a wonderful euphemism for the mysteries of early 15th-century rhythmic complexity.

Now, imagine musical discourse stripped of such terms. Imagine replacing every recurrence of the word “minimalism” in the literature with “that steady-pulse, doodle-doodle style of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.” Of course, even that becomes a term, just a cumbersome one, and if you forbid terms, you really forbid generalization. So now you have four pieces written in the 1960s – Music in Fifths, Piano Phase, Philomel, and In C – and you are not allowed to say that one of them stands out from the other three, you are forced to describe each individually. It would save so many words to say, Three of those pieces are minimalist and one serialist, and a cultured person would understand you – but no, no, that would falsify the sacred particularities of each piece. You’d gain insight from hearing survivals of the style galant in Mozart’s rondos, but you can no longer say that – you can only refer over and over to a recurrence of quick 6/8 meter and a certain type of figuration. No more do you get to divide Stravinsky’s output into Russian, neoclassic, and 12-tone periods – just a continuum in which each piece merits its own description.

In general, two kinds of people make up musical terms: composers and music historians. I am both – or rather, I was hired as the latter because as a “Downtowner” (another term) I have no credibility as the former, and please don’t mention my little charade to the administration. Musicology is alleged to be a science of some kind (thus the “-ology” suffix), and part of its science is dividing up a gigantic chaos of historical phenomena into manageable bits based on similarity and contrast. As the first person to write a book about Nancarrow I had to come up with terms (“convergence point”) with which to analyze his canons, or else I would have gotten lost in a sea of awkward verbiage (imagine “that point at which all the voices coincide on the same analogous note in their isomorphic sequences” over and over on every page). Writing a book that focused on American music of the 1980s and 1990s when no one had ever done so before, I was obliged by the demands of the task to separate composers into categories based on similarity. The term “postminimalism” was already in the air, and the late Rob Schwartz had used it as a chapter heading – I just tightened up the definition. “Totalism” was a word coined by the composers themselves. I didn’t just go to a few concerts as a critic to hone my own definitions; as a musicologist I studied an entire file cabinet’s worth of home-bound scores elicited from the composers.

Terminology is the musicologist’s creative medium. Get too creative and the term won’t stick to the phenomena, but not evocative enough and it will lack resonance. No one pretends that terms are perfect. Some are so broad and contradictory in application as to be stumbling blocks, like “classical.” “Neoclassic” usually really connotes “neobaroque,” but every cultured person knows that and makes allowances. Luckily, terms come and go in a very clear survival of the fittest. “Postromantic” used to be useful for distinguishing Mahler and Strauss from the generation of Brahms and Wagner, but has fallen out of favor, as has “Fauvism” for the primitive style of Stravinsky and… well, perhaps that’s why it didn’t survive. One interesting recent development, acquiesced to by even the term-haters, is that “modern,” which used to just mean “up to date,” is increasingly bracketed for the challenging, dissonant music of the mid-20th century. We teach terminology, -isms, in the classroom, and we’re not likely to stop – for the very good reasons that we would become more verbose, we would be able to say less, and we would sound stupider.

Of course, artists don’t like thinking about terms. Nothing is more fatal to creativity than to already know the answer before you frame the question. Artists have good reason to be suspicious about what terms you yoke them to, because terms wield power. Tom Johnson, a critic, was the only composer who ever flatly called himself a minimalist, and I consider myself more or less a totalist. But I don’t think, as I start each piece, “Now, how to once again embody the principles of totalism?!” Only an idiot would do that. Kyle the composer couldn’t care less whether his piece turns out to be what Kyle the historian and critic calls totalist. It’s not an artist’s business to think about terms – unless needed for sometimes very practical career purposes, and even then not while in the act of creating. Still, I find it sort of hilarious that just now, as composers run from terms as though they carried viruses, the young pop musicians are churning out new terms almost monthly – jungle, illbient, drum and bass, liquid funk, and many others I can’t remember and that those who use them can’t even seem to distinguish in meaning when asked. What are the classical composers so afraid of that the pop musicians have so much fun playing with? I thought we were invited to learn from the pop musicians.

So rail against terminology, rail, rail, rail, rail!! Everyone expects it of artists. Critics, expunge “minimalism,” “neoclassicism,” “empfindsamer stil” from your vocabulary, and see if you enjoy being less literate. But I believe that in this era of exponentially expanding numbers of composers, the opportunity for chaos is so great that the need for terminology will become more important than ever. For – and here’s my one sane opinion, in case you had lost all hope that I retain any grasp of reality – it is unimaginable that some mainstream style is going to coalesce in the forseeable future. And also undesirable – can you imagine 50,000 composers writing in the same style? Jesus, it’d be like the 17th century cubed. You’d have to distinguish John Aloysius Brown’s Ricercar No. 27 in E-flat from John Lothario Brown’s Ricercar No. 27 in E-flat by the fact that one uses mutes. The obvious current in culture today, vastly facilitated by the internet, is toward greater fragmentation of subcultures. And subcultures need to be identified, and distinguished – defined, which is not the same as frozen or calcified or engraved in granite. The pop musicians are on the case. But you classical musicians, rail! Rail! Unless the culture as a whole lapses into barbarism, those oh-so-beside-the-point terms, -isms, categories, style names, will continue to be used, and will multiply. They’re how we make sense of our world.

I await, with amusement, your undoubted unanimous dissent. I’ll call you the “antitermists.”

Fellow blogger Drew McManus adds some apt cautionary points to my musings on granting degrees in music criticism:

One of my overriding thoughts while reading the series of posts has been “why is it that a good share of music critics have no serious musical training?” I know that’s a topic worthy of a large amount of debate, but I wonder that if too many schools eventually start offering degrees in music criticism then aren’t they going to start producing more and more individuals that have no direct experience with the art they are creating?

Granted, academically verified music criticism is at such an infant stage most people probably don’t think about those long term evolutionary issues, but it does occur to me. I compare it to how arts administration degree programs have developed. The more AA programs expand, the more they develop managers that have to have absolutely zero experience as an artist or even a direct understanding of art. At the initial stages of these programs, that thought was abhorrent, but a mere decade later it’s an accepted fact.

It never takes long for mediocrity to sink its evil claws into a good idea.

Well, thousands of years of civilization have found no cure to ameliorate that last fact. A graduate program in criticism could require a degree in performance or composition as a prerequisite. Maybe I just want to play a bunch of budding music critics some repertoire they’ll never hear in the usual concert halls.

A press release informs me that Syracuse University has opened the first master’s degree program in arts criticism offered by a journalism school. The program opens in July 2005.

I consider this good news. Many, many years ago, Peabody Conservatory had the only music criticism graduate program in the country, run by the late esteemed jazz critic Martin Williams. He invited other critics to come lecture, and brought me out; unfortunately, at the time there were only two students, and they of the most troglodytic musical tendencies. The program was discontinued after Williams passed away. My reflections at the time were that teaching music criticism was a poor idea. You could teach someone to know a lot about music, and you can teach writing, but trying to teach both together seemed pointless.

I later changed my mind, however. Writing about the arts is so extremely different from other journalism, and also not something anyone would learn in the average music school. (I remember once writing a piece for the Chicago Tribune and being informed by some hotshot editor fresh out of Northwestern journalism school that I wasn’t allowed to use the pronoun “I” in journalistic writing. I asked her how I was supposed to express my own opinion without it. A higher editor overruled her.) I’ve come to believe that the many aspects of what can be said about music – atmosphere, analysis, performance, context, history – can be analyzed out, their relationships studied, and the purposes of subjectivity and objectivity specified. And for the first time, I’m teaching a music criticism course this fall, with Virgil Thomson, Gary Giddins, and Lester Bangs as my main textbooks. (I know Greg Sandow already teaches such a course at Juilliard.)

Even more importantly, I’ve decided that by not teaching music criticism, we allow people to think it’s unimportant, that no training is required, and that the job comes with very little responsibility. I’m not saying that critics who studied music criticism in college would automatically be smarter and more open-minded than the ones we already have – I don’t have that kind of faith in academia. But I do think some concentrated attention to the genre might kick us out of some critical ruts, and create some prestige for the profession that would attract people who truly saw it as a calling, rather than just fell into it by default. As I did.

So all the best to Syracuse University.

If you’re looking for me this week, it looks like all my blogging energy is going to be siphoned into Arts Journal‘s Critical Conversation. I’ll be over there – probably too much – if you want your weekly dose of unpopular new-music views.

I’ve just finished reading David Shenk’s lovely, humane, elegantly-written book about Alzheimer’s disease, The Forgetting (Anchor Books). What struck me most, professionally, was the view he gives of politics within the scientific community. It seems that the trend today is for scientists, rather than working together in an academic environment as they used to, to gear their research toward the profit sector, for pharmaceutical corporations. Crucial new medical findings are no longer freely shared, because a lot of money depends on getting the vaccine out first. And yet, counterproductive as this may sound, the scientists Shenk interviews, such as Allan Roses here, defend money as a more efficient motivator for scientific progress than academic prestige:

”I was in a situation where I was spending 50 to 60 percent of my time writing grants that never got funded,” [Roses] said of the contrast. “We argued for years about whether [the human gene] ApoE is inside neurons or not. It is in the neurons. We went to every meeting. They said, ‘It’s not in the neurons.’ We would write a grant proposal. ‘Oh, you can’t do that – it isn’t in neurons.’ No grant. So what we have done now is say, ‘Piss off. We’re just going to do it. We’re going to do it right and objectively, on the basis of the data’…. I don’t have to take the time or the people it would involve to publish it.

”Am I keeping anything from my fellow researchers around the world in Alzheimer’s disease? Hell no! All they ever did when I ever said anything was to say, ‘No, no, no.’ We would just argue it at all those scientific meetings. Now we debate in the context of very critical, highly skilled scientists who know that our viability as a team, our viability as a company, and our jobs depend on it – not whether we get it first into publication.” (pp. 188-189)

So innovative scientists, too, get their grants turned down by academics saying, “No, no, no, you can’t do that.” Who knew? The implications of this reconfigured career strategy for music are… well, I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

I am buffeted about in a whirlwind of preparations for the upcoming Bard Festival, which is devoted to Shostakovich this year. In 12 years in Chicago, I never met a hardcore Shostakovich fan, even among CSO buffs. Likewise eight years in Pennsylvania, nor in all these years of working in New York. But upon moving to the Hudson Valley, I suddenly found Shostakovich peripheral no more. Composers around here quote his tunes in their own works; every young string player practices the Shostakovich sonatas and quartets; the Eighth Quartet is such a staple in chamber music concerts I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard it; and new music fans here plan life around Shostakovich concerts with an avidity that musicians in my circle reserve for the rare Partch or Feldman performance. I’ve never minded hearing a Shostakovich work played, but his music doesn’t grow on me, even with as many Eighth Quartets as I’ve heard and as many CDs of the symphonies I’ve bought trying to spark an interest. If his music disappeared from concert and recorded life tomorrow I wouldn’t pause long to think about it. Other places I’ve lived, I didn’t have to count that among my many musical eccentricities, but in the Husdon Valley it’s been added to the list.

There are other ways in which the Hudson Valley is different. For instance, classical students around here cite the late Robert Starer among their favorite composers, a name that would barely register recognition anywhere else in the country.

Critic Marc Geelhoed, who’s moving to the great old Chicago Reader where I started out my career (1983-86), responds to my post about composers in academia with some gratifying reflections:

It was kind of beyond the scope of your blog, but you didn’t mention the value composers bring to their communities. The biggest benefit, to me at least, a composer can have on his or her community is having the chance to expose the citizens to music they wouldn’t hear otherwise. This is especially true in small colleges outside the major urban areas. This is assuming they have some say in programming recitals and concerts, which usually comes with the territory of teaching, I think.

Composers also demystify new music and allow people to put a human face on composers. This reduced the fear factor a little. Talking and smiling before a piece has to help the audience a little.

Nice to hear the presence of composers so appreciated. As a composer who works to expose young people to radical and unknown music, though, I have to report that we struggle with an ongoing dilemma of priorities: Can we introduce students to Sorabji, Nono, Partch, Cecil Taylor, Meredith Monk, when they come out of high school not yet having heard of Brahms, Wagner, Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, Bartok? It’s difficult, in a brief four years, especially in a liberal arts environment where the sciences and literature demand much of their attention, to inculcate some firm sense of a normative musical practice, and yet also spend significant time with the interesting weirdos. Painted onto a tabula rasa, Haydn seems just about as kooky as Anthony Braxton and vice versa. My colleagues and I periodically toy with the idea of starting out, “Classical music was invented in 1952, when a man named John Cage wrote a piece called 4’33”.” Fortunately or not, our attempt to start the history of music over from scratch invariably breaks down somewhere – often because I have to teach the late Beethoven sonatas, and my friends can’t stand them not hearing Varèse.

What have I been doing instead of blogging, instead of letting you know what’s going on in the exciting world of new music? Why, composing, of course. And more particularly, confronting the scary fact of being a composer in academia and trying to figure out how to cope with it.

“Academic composer” became a harshly negative term in the 1970s. Technically, to the extent that it refers to composers who teach in colleges, I’ve become one, and now that I’m tenured and really settled into the life, I struggle on a weekly basis with the nature of the beast. There are truly many dangers to one’s musical creativity associated with teaching for a living. They’re on my mind a lot, and perhaps the most entertaining thing I can do at the moment, in the absence of other stimuli, is outline them as best I can.

The most common connotation of “academic composer” is someone whose music and musical opinions are relentlessly highbrow and intellectual, who has contempt for any music that can be easily understood. This stereotype never really applied to composers at most colleges, and it probably applies to fewer today than it did 20 years ago. It applies most accurately to composing faculty at some of the more “prestigious,” hoity-toity music schools – which there is no need to list here. In the ’70s and ’80s these were by far the best-known “academic composers,” and they gave the group a really bad name. But their influence, like that of the Neocons, is definitely on the wane, and for similar reasons. They led us into quagmires.

Even so, there are more widespread psychological difficulties that face any creative artist who teaches in an institution of higher learning for a living. Some of the more obvious ones I’m pretty much immune to – perhaps because I spent the first 16 years of my post-college life earning my living outside academia. One is the tendency to get your ego strokes from the fact that 19-year-olds find you brilliant and your knowledge impressive. Some professors get so used to reflections of their encyclopedic wisdom in the awe expressed by inexperienced young people that they lose perspective about where they stand in the adult world. My students, for instance, may think it’s amazing that I can refer to all of the Beethoven string quartets by opus number off the top of my head, but it isn’t: it simply indicates I’ve been around for awhile. Might as well be impressed because I know all the street names in my neighborhood. I’ve known a couple professors so intoxicated by the admiration of their students that they grow uncomfortable in the company of other professional adults, and start shunning adult contact to hang out with their students and continue being the Big Man. It’s good to keep in mind what Morton Feldman said about the hardcore academic composers: “They have reduced the music of an entire nation to a college level” – a reminder that the level of college discourse is, or should be, intrinsically lower than that of the post-graduate professional world.

A related danger is the temptation to start thinking of your college population as the real audience for your music. It’s difficult and rare to get truly objective feedback on your music from your students and especially your collegiate colleagues. The latter are pretty much guaranteed to pat you on the back without giving you much critical thought, and student admiration is mixed up with all kinds of extraneous influences, including the extent to which you present a similarity or contrast with their parents, and how they feel about them. Much, much more edifying to have a performance for a roomful of lay strangers who owe you nothing, and to watch their reactions and listen to their particular praise and what they reject. I never encourage performances of my music at my own school, which do nothing for me professionally; at best they provide a pro forma validation to the community that my authority as a teacher is grounded in some practical ability. But I have known professor-composers whose entire career has pretty much taken place within the confines of the college auditorium (augmented by performance-exchange programs with other schools). This leads to a kind of debilitating solipsistic smugness, since your music draws loads of lukewarm praise and almost never any outright rejection.

This much I can avoid, but there are other influences more insidious. One is the pervasive proximity to music theory. Like most college composers, I spend a lot of time teaching theory, preoccupied on a daily basis with musical phenomena that have names and can be defined. This is not good for one’s composing, and it keeps me in a state of daily resistance. Pivot-chord modulations, augmented sixth chords, and the like are tools developed by long-dead composers for music very different from ours today, and while you need to spend your life developing the specific tools you need for the job you’ve created, it is difficult to resist using tools that you have lying around your mental studio floor so ready-to-hand. The ongoing tension has given rise to a rainbow of solutions and compromises, and has been responsible, I think, for a general stylistic change in my music over the last seven years. Teaching music history, interestingly, which I also do, doesn’t present the same mental bind, and though it’s more time-consuming for me, I recommend it to those so inclined. I’m perversely lucky, by the way, that I am considered the theory/history teacher at my school, and not the composition teacher: my music can exhibit a simplicity, direct emotional appeal, and vernacular influence that goes against the grain of the more musically intellectual types without tarnishing my professorial authority. I’m not really a composer, you know.

But the worst condition of the “academic composer” is the amount of mental and emotional energy siphoned away from creativity and into administrative and pedagogical concerns. Every professor will tell you that teaching is by far the best and easiest part of the job: what requires and consumes far more energy is the committee meetings, the politics, the territorial and curricular disputes, the power grabs to be resisted, the bookkeeping demands made by the administration. It used to be, when I was young, that I could make a three-hour road trip and spend almost the entire time engaged in what I can only call acts of sonic imagination: where should this melody go, what would this rhythm sound like against that one, what succession of keys or harmonies would make for a satisfyingly organic structure? When that mental energy gets harnessed instead into composing in your head a memo to the Dean, or listing arguments to shore up a defense against encroachments by some department chair, you’re in trouble. You find yourself obsessing about things that, in an earlier sane moment in your life, you would have realized are of absolutely no consequence. The issues you’re getting passionate about are, in point of fact, academic.

And that’s the real danger of composing in academia, even for the most open-minded and well-intentioned artist, that takes all one’s powers to be aware of and resist: it threatens to turn you into a dilletante. You write a piece over Christmas break and another one between conferences in the summer, and composing becomes more a respite from the rigors of your teaching career than the central focus, the meaning of your life, the defining end of your personality, that it used to be. Composing infrequently leads to a too-easy satisfaction with your current technical prowess. You use a few techniques in one piece, and, forgetting in the whirlwind of the semester what that was like, six months later you use those same techniques in another – and it seems sufficient. You don’t become immersed enough in your own creative process to grow dissatisfied with it, to damn your own limitations, to be struck by your own repetitive reflexes. You don’t work yourself into a creative crisis, as you can writing several pieces in quick succession, that demands that you break through to a new plateau. Your music ceases to communicate – because you’re in an artificial environment in which failing to communicate carries no penalty. The built-in college audience cushions you from a real-world response that would make this painfully apparent.

Don’t mistake this for a complaint about my cushy life. Such dangers are not entirely confined to academia – to a certain extent they are the nature of day jobs. The worst thing I could imagine is having an exhausting, 9-to-5 job outside of music, one that would leave little energy left at the end of the day and on weekends to remember what I wanted to compose and why. I couldn’t do what Charles Ives did. If I had to wake up every morning and devote myself to something that wasn’t about music, I’d shoot myself – some composers are different, and relish the diversion. Even inherited wealth, as Virgil Thomson pointed out, harbors dire pitfalls for the creative mind. I know composers who live their lives pretty much being composers, and they expend about as much energy applying for grants and commissions and awards and trying to line up gigs as I do teaching. That kind of life isn’t open to me: I don’t ask for things well, I rarely make good first impressions, especially on someone I want something from, I don’t toot my own horn gracefully, and I’m not good at hiding the resentment that accompanies what can only be called institutionalized begging. These are my shortcomings, and it proved more practical to work around than fix them. I like the paycheck deposited into my account every month without me having to humble or exalt myself to get it, and criticism and teaching have both afforded me that. Committee meetings exact a milder toll on my creative process than financial insecurity used to.

The evil of the academic creative life is that the dangers come with so many rewards, that they are so seductive. You have prestige, and a position. People kowtow to you on the basis of your laurels, without ongoing achivement being necessary. Sit back and recycle your paltry information, and a certain mild level of honors will flow to you automatically. You write a chamber piece, it will be played by people you know for people you know, and it takes energy and ambition to tell yourself every day that that’s not enough – that it’s not anything, in fact. The danger of teaching (and of criticism as well), unlike plumbing or working on computers, is that you’ll start to identify with your role, a role in which authority is conferred on you by an external institution. That assumption of an authority that does not come completely from within, from one’s own personal powers of persuasion and decision, is fatal, I think, to an artist. It is the static authority of a Salieri as opposed to the irreverent vulnerability of a Mozart.

I do not, however, join the chorus of people who say that creative artists shouldn’t be given tenured positions. I utterly reject the paternalistic treatment of artists whereby they should be kept starving and insecure “for their own good,” the ludicrous idea that some administrator knows what my soul needs for its sustenance. Every artist, no matter what his or her day job entails, is responsible for learning and applying the mental hygeine appropriate to it. The history of creative artists in academia is a brief one, when you think about it – John Knowles Paine created the first music professorship in America in 1876, and composers didn’t flood into academia until the 1960s. It’s premature to conclude that we can’t learn to deal with this. I ground myself in musicians who had no academic aspirations, from James P. Johnson to Harold Budd to Morton Feldman to Bob Dylan to the Residents; I keep my composing career separate from my job and cultivate it away from colleges in general; I refer to teaching as “my day job” every chance I get, just as a reminder; and in the months I can I compose like a Tasmanian devil, trying to make a year’s worth of music in a summer. I chose this life because 1. I didn’t like the way creative music was treated in the university and I wanted to change things, and 2. the world of print journalism was crumbling and I needed a place to jump to. It’s up to me to make it work. As Erik Satie said, “If I fail, so much the worse for me; it’ll mean I had nothing in me to begin with.” In the meantime, I’ve learned something that doesn’t particularly surprise me: that composing in academia without sliding into becoming an “academic composer” is really, really difficult.