Yesterday I had the great pleasure of lecturing on Cage and my own music at the Hartt School in Hartford, at the invitation of Robert Carl and Ken Steen. I’m always joking with them about doing endorsements for the place, and I might as well proceed. Hartt is one of the few graduate schools I recommend for my own students and for those who share my anti-establishment musical interests – others are CalArts, Mills College, Yale, and Wesleyan. But Yale and Wesleyan accept only a tiny number of students and are all but impossible to get into; Hartt has significantly more slots open. Hartt doesn’t seem to have the reputation it did in the mid-20th-century, and I can’t figure out why. I was certainly aware of it as a teenager, possibly because my first composition teacher Alvin Epstein studied and taught there, whereas I was in my 30s before I heard of Bard. One never really knows what goes on in a department from the outside, but the atmosphere there seems enviable, the faculty open-minded and mutually supportive. I’ve sent two students there now, and both of them have been amazed what’s been required from them in learning ear-training, score-reading, and other nuts-and-bolts topics. They take musical education very seriously. The students call it “Boulanger Lite,” and the curriculum does seem copied from the Paris Conservatoire. Nevertheless, it’s one of the few places where one could pursue microtonality, Downtown music, and even conceptualism without drawing down faculty discouragement, PLUS study electronic music in friendlier softwares than Max/MSP and Supercollider. I was very impressed this time with the level and camaraderie of grad students. I got to sit in on Robert’s “Cage, Carter, and Crumb” class, and he was running circles around me in the Cage analysis department. Maybe being slightly underrated is what gives a music department a vibrant energy, while acquiring the “prestige” label turns it into a nest of vipers. If I could do grad school again, I can’t imagine a place I’d rather do it than Hartt.
Search Results for: underrated
Countries with Sexier Composers than Us
OK, kids, gather around, it’s time for Uncle Kyle to continue your education in Serbian music. I’ve already told you about Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), who was the country’s leading modernist composer of the early 20th century, and the only woman to occupy that position in her country’s culture. Nor will I repeat what I said there about Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac (1856-1914), the country’s leading musical patriarch and composer of traditional choral music.
Narayana’s Cows with the Perfect Sauce
The big minimalist event today was maximalist indeed – a celebrity dinner party at Arthur Bryant’s, just about the most famous barbecue place in the world. The photo below just postdated Mikel Rouse’s departure, but still we had Rachel McIntire (David’s daughter, video-documenting the conference); composers Paul Epstein, Charlemagne Palestine, and Scott Unrein; pianist Sarah Cahill; and musicologists Keith Potter, Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, and Pwyll ap Sion:Â
What Composers Talk About
I’ll bet that if you ran a new-music series and gave composers the following choice – “We’ll either give you a $500 honorarium, or you can have $100 and talk about yourself to the audience for 20 minutes” – almost all composers who aren’t in dire financial straits would choose the latter option. When the subject is ourselves, we do not like to shut up. I was on a panel of composers last night preceding the Cutting Edge series concert at Symphony Space, and the desire to chatter on was palpable. William Bolcom was the grand old man of the group, and seemed accustomed to occupying a stage by himself; we all deferred to him and let him talk most. Two of the other composers had, in fact, been students of his. Composer Victoria Bond, who runs the series, has clearly been in the moderation business a long time. She cut off each composer as graciously as though he had come to the end of a prepared text.
Whence comes this intense desire for self-expression? The yearning to have our music played, the prestige of gigs, the need to get money for our work, are all easily understandable. But why do I want the audience to know, before it hears my music, that I studied with Ben Johnston? Victoria drew a tentative connection between a vernacular element in my work and the fact that I’m from Dallas, and I slightly bridled at being thought of as a “Dallas composer.” Why? How silly. Do we imagine we’ll be the more admired if we say something clever? that some credential we bring up offhandedly will convince someone to give our music a more serious listen? Why does the picture our music draws seem so incomplete? The desire isn’t quite universal. Conlon Nancarrow was famous for answering series’ of long questions with a bare yes or no. Frederic Rzewski seems to use the interview format to prevent people from learning anything about him. But most of us are pathetically eager for an opportunity to represent ourselves, to draw a picture of our character for the audience. And, being so, we naturally bend over backward not to appear so. Every composer learns to efface himself in such situations, to substitute for some unyielding conviction a gentle joke that signals that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. We take turns out-modesting each other. We sensitize ourselves to the slightest clue that the interviewer is ready to move on. We conform, chameleonlike, to whatever level of discourse our peers launch into.
I’m old enough to recall when composers spoke more dogmatically and aggressively in public. Back in the day when we tended more to be judged by the intricacy and objectivity of our systems, we were more given to explanation. Composers informed the audience what to listen for, detailed their patented pitch methods, proclaimed their allegiances to this school or that. Of course we all know why this went out of favor. The audience didn’t much care about those pitch systems anyway, and rarely heard what we told them to hear. We were shamed out of that dogmatic technical mode, and scarred by the aesthetic battles that were its context. Next, starting in the late 1980s, came the “influences” trope: “My influences include….” For the liberal among us, “my influences” generally included Arnold Schoenberg and John Lee Hooker, or Brian Ferneyhough and the Sex Pistols – to prove to the audience that though we were intellectuals, we weren’t snobs.
These days it’s all personal. Paul Yeon Lee heard his piece in a dream. Derek Bermel got his compositional idea from listening to foreign-language tapes. William Bolcom talked about underrated musicians he had known. Mark Grey extolled the colors of the light in the valley in Austria where he lives. I talked about visiting Nancarrow in Mexico City. After the bad old days in which composers used to impress their audiences with technical expertise and quasi-scientific musical mandates, we seem to be on a huge swingback, more modestly just trying to convince the audience that we’re nice, down-to-earth guys. (I don’t mean to single out this concert at all: I’ve been noticing this phenomenon for more than a decade, and used to write about it at briefer length in the Village Voice.) The prestige of the modern composer has fallen so far that I think the reflexive self-effacement is a true reflection of the perception that society doesn’t take composers very seriously anymore. Still recoiling from the days in which we were all trying to be the next Stockhausen, now we’re all trying to convince the audience members that we’re just like them, except we write music. In front of an audience of complete amateurs this has one effect, but seems a little different in front of the musically sophisticated listeners that the Cutting Edge Concerts seem to attract, or so it felt. Despite the thousands of hours we put into honing our compositional philosophies, we’re afraid to be leaders, or to pretend to be experts.
But we composers have more to say than this. What did it mean that Bolcom’s trio had clear, vernacular-tinged rhythms couched in a bracingly dissonant pitch language? Or that Grey’s A Rax Dawn for piano was precisely the opposite, lushly Romantic in its harmonies but fluidly mercurial and complex in its rhythms? What do such choices have to do with our strategies for reaching an audience? In 2009, each of us can choose any musical language he fancies; what philosophic or social concerns guide our choices? How are composers responding to the world financial crisis? The response in 1933 couldn’t have been starker: abstract, dissonant music was abruptly discredited, writing music for the masses was in, and quoting Appalachian folksongs got you extra credit. What’s our response now? Some of us pitch our music toward audiences, quoting or appropriating whatever elements might draw them in. Others devoutly believe in autonomous personal expression, and are content with however small an audience their idiosyncrasies attract. How are we dealing with the ascendence and hegemony of commercially supported pop music?Â
No one wants the aesthetic battles of the 1980s to return, but by now we ought to be able to address big issues without dogmatism. I, personally, regret the lack of substantive dialogue in the current new-music scene, but it seems symptomatic of our current condition. Privately, I imagine we are all still inspired by Big Ideas – I know I am – but publicly, we hide their effect. Perhaps we’re in too mushy a period to draw coherent distinctions. We’re split into subcultures, and no one wants to offend anyone else. Everyone feels a little helpless. No generalizable new language beckons. The personal seems safe, unthreatening. But where are the important issues facing early 21st-century music to be delineated? Certainly not by critics, who don’t understand the compositional issues at stake. Some of us composers are desperately trying to reach the audiences who fled from late modernism, but reluctant to admit that fact. Others continue in a straight line determined by their education, and don’t want to confront the popularity issue at all. I envy the discourse of novelists reviewing other novelists in the Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books: writing words about someone else’s words, they take on big issues, and are not reduced to personalities. I’ve spent thousands of hours contemplating what kind of music I ought to be writing, and I wish I could get out in public with other composers and work out the why and wherefore, rather than retreat into whatever personal tidbits of my life seem relevant to the piece at hand.
I came home and dreamed that I was ineffectively singing the Grandpa role in a school production of Copland’s The Tender Land (of which I bought a vocal score last week). The second act was taken up by a long monologue by the heroine Laurie’s rebellious little brother, whom I’d never noticed in the opera before – because he doesn’t exist. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Serbia / New York
If you’re in the Bard area, tomorrow afternoon I’m sponsoring a talk on Serbian music by my musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, who’s in the States researching Cage’s early music for one of her many projects. She’s a fantastic scholar, obsessed with detail, and has taught me a lot about Nancarrow from his correspondence – I’m trying to convince her she’s the perfect person to write a biography. Here she’ll be going through the variety of 20th-century Serbian music, talking most importantly about Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), Serbia’s national innovative modernist. The talk’s Thursday, April 16, at 4, Room 217 in the Blum music building at Bard College.
Idiot’s Guide to PostClassic
Statistically speaking, you probably don’t agree with a word I say. Out there in the larger world of contemporary music, Elliott Carter is king, we are smack dab in the middle of the modernist period which will never end, the purpose of serious music is to convey how terrible the world is, and art is infinitely superior to entertainment and should never be confused with it. This blog is a repository of minority opinion, a haven and beacon for those few of us who happen not to agree with those propositions. We are painfully aware how tiny our numbers are, how overwhelming and monolithic the well-educated, well-entrenched opposition. Nevertheless, we remain content to disagree with the Conventional Wisdom.Â
This makes the comments feature something of a problem. The messages I get from people who understand the context of this blog vastly enliven it, and I treasure them. But for some reason, we periodically seem to attract momentary attention from the Conventional Wisdom crowd, who, horrified by a random phrase here and there, write in to portray me as some kind of trance-music Madame Mao determined to bomb classical music back to the stone age. I don’t have time or energy to re-explain my entire life story to every rubber-necking newcomer who chances by to ask the new-music equivalent of, “When are you going to stop beating your wife?!” So rather than post those comments, I’m going to try to write a meta-post explaining a few premises of this blog, a series of such posts if necessary, so in the future I can simply refer those people to this URL.
So, for the uninitiated, let me address some myths about PostClassic:
Myth No. 1: I Am Opposed to All Complex, Difficult, and Atonal Music. In the first music history course I took at Oberlin, the professor played Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I for the class with poorly concealed distaste, and it was left to me, a freshman from Texas, to defend Stockhausen to the class as a remarkable and important composer. That was 1973. The first piece I wrote at Oberlin was influenced mainly by Luciano Berio’s Circles. The Darmstadt serialist repertoire was the first brand new music I imbibed, and I did so in high school. I absorbed it on my own, to the incomprehension of my peers, uncontaminated by the pressures of mentorship, which is perhaps why my attachment to it never became dogmatic. I guess what happens with most composers, still today, is that some college professor introduces them to serialism, and learning to appreciate it becomes some kind of entrée into the professional world, from which there is no turning back. For me it was a private affair; I felt free to accept from it what I liked and reject what, after dozens of obsessive listenings and all the reading material I could find, I didn’t.
Therefore the automatic disdain of the amateur who thinks nothing good can come from 12-tone method, and the automatic reverence of the professional composer for whom 12-tone music was The Noble Experiment, I find equally shallow. My writings on complex and difficult music have been extremely nuanced. I’ve written with varying degrees of closely analyzed enthusiasm about  Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, Dallapiccola, twelve-tone Stravinsky, Takemitsu, Rochberg, Rochberg again, Stefan Wolpe, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, ’50s Carter and ’60s Boulez, the ultracomplex music of Mike Maguire, some fanatically complex music by Cornelis de Bondt,rhythmic complexity, complexity in general, 12-tone music again and again. If you can read all that and still claim that I have no deep affection for complex, difficult, or atonal music, maybe it’s time to admit that reading comprehension isn’t your forte. “I find it rather foolish that we would dismiss all music which simply defies even the sharpest of listeners to catch every detail the first time they hear it,” cried a commenter in anguish a few weeks ago. That someone could feel a need to say this to me, of all people, almost extinguishes all hope.Â
Of course it’s probably, as Darcy James Argue says, that the Fraternity of Serious Composers defines themselves in opposition to popular taste, and if you admit to disliking even one complex, difficult piece you are immediately suspected of being an Unreliable Club Member and therefore must be rooted out and rehabilitated. Unreliable Club Member: that I’ll plead guilty to. I no more pledge allegiance to minimalism than I do to serialism: I find The Desert Music problematic, Different Trains didn’t grow on me, and I’ve written some of Glass’s most blistering opera reviews. I am no ideologue.
Myth No. 2: I Write Music for Audiences. This one is actually true, but with qualifications. Almost every composer, even the regular commenters on this blog, will cite you the Conventional Wisdom about whom one writes for: “I only write for myself, taking my own taste as representative, since there is no such thing as ‘The Audience,’ everyone listens differently. Complexity is only a subjective perception anyway, and after all I saw Brian Ferneyhough get a standing ovation at Miller Theater once, and posterity will sort it all out, yada yada yada.” Of course, you presumably already know what’s going on in your music and a stranger listening to it doesn’t have that inside scoop, and by trivializing that perceptual asymmetry, this line of thought provides an effortless rationale to save you the trouble of clarifying your ideas to the point that no one can miss the point of your music. On this issue I am way, way, way in the minority, even among friends. But I am not alone. As one of my regulars once responded:
The “I’m writing only for myself”-line I’ve always regarded as cynical and defensive. It’s the art composer accepting his marginalisation by capitalist society, or even trying to pass it off as a great and heroic thing. Nonsense! Even Schoenberg couldn’t stomach that. Yes, our art may come out of some sort of composerly ascesis, but it’s not meant to stay there!
There is another tradition: that of Aaron Copland in the 1930s when he said, “It seemed to me that composers were in danger of working in a vacuum… I felt it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” The tradition of Marc Blitzstein who protrayed artists in The Cradle Will Rock as the biggest corporate whores of all, of Hanns Eisler who broke away from Schoenberg to write worker’s choruses, of Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? And it is the same tradition, though we didn’t articulate it as militantly, as the populist movement that surrounded the New Music America festivals of the 1980s; without getting terribly political about it in the left/right sense, we were excited that a large group of composers had returned from the arid wastelands of the serialist avant-garde to write music that audiences could find hip and exciting again. It is even the tradition of Steve Reich, who wrote in 1967 that “Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy.” Perhaps it’s populism’s tragedy that its two most eloquent apologists, Tolstoy and Cardew, wrote overly extreme, over-the-top books whose excesses are only too easy to refute. Nevertheless, phrases from those books stick in my head, unanswerable, forming part of my musical conscience. Despise me as you will, I compose with the audience in mind.Â
But I am no extremist, in this or anything else. Put a gun to my head, and I’d say that populism and narcissism are two poles between which an artist should vacillate, satisfying now one, now the other, and that the psychologically effective strategy is not to get stuck permanently at either end. If I am a fascist for believing that there is any worthwhile alternative to narcissism, as a commenter called me, then Aaron Copland was Stalin himself. (And besides, the more historically resonant epithet to throw at me would have been “communist!,” which I would have accepted in better grace.) Just as I need not defend complex music, since only simple music comes under attack from the composing community, neither do I need to defend narcissism, which is the catholic church to which all composers subscribe except for a few of us outcast heretics. But I do defend, when the occasion arises, the opposite pole of populism. Some people take from this the uncharitable view that I am irrevocably opposed to selfishness and self-aggrandizement, when, really, it’s just that I think it’s probably not politic to wallow in them 24/7/365.
If you disagree with me, as chances are you do, I need not hear from you about it. To violently disagree with me on this issue is to be a walking cliché, a stock character: a composer who writes only to please himself. There are 40,000 of you out there at last count. I know exactly what you think, and need no reminder. You will never experience the grace with which Shakespeare could address the audience through the mouth of Prospero, who closes The Tempest by saying,
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.
(How cynical of Shakespeare to so pretend, since as a great artist he must have known that great artists write only for themselves.) Take comfort in the fact that opinion within the composing community is nigh unanimous on your side. Take no notice of the deplorable situation that new music composition is an art almost completely absent from the world’s enthusiasms: surely the fact that composers are trained to write only for themselves bears no responsibility for that. And consider that the attempted squelching of my populist dissent is more fascist in character than it would be to allow me my tiny minority opinion, which threatens you no harm. Which leads us to:
Myth No. 3: I Control What Happens in the New-Music World. How in hell did that one arise? What’s with the fear that I’m going to disenfranchise lovers of complex music, that I am on the verge of descending from Olympus and imposing my will on the new-music performance scene? Me?! Does James Levine never pencil a title into his conducting schedule without running it by me first? Are Dana Gioia and I are on the phone daily so I can confirm which composers are up and which are down at the NEA this month? Does the new-music programming of Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen hinge on my suggestions? Do I wave my hand and the complexion of the upcoming concert season is altered?
The world of academic composition is tightly barricaded against people who hold views like mine. My colleagues circle the wagons to make sure my radical ideas don’t infect the students. Every year I have to argue that it’s OK for student pieces to have only one dynamic level all the way through. My suggestion that students ought to be allowed to learn composition software other than Max/MSP incited World War III. My simplest, most common-sense ideas are too radical for musical academia. Except for a few jokers at Yale who like to live dangerously by exposing students to me, the academic composition world has closed me out. (I occasionally hear that some blog entry of mine is brought into composition class to start an argument with, but it may just be Rob Deemer over and over again.) I used to sit on the occasional composer panel, but haven’t been asked in years. No one I’ve written a Guggenheim recommendation for has ever received one. And as for the world of contemporary music performance, I’m not even a hair on a gnat on an elephant’s rump. So what’s with this panic that I’m going to rearrange the furniture, and heads will roll? I am at best the Dennis Kucinich of the composing world, considered insightful by some on the crazy left but with views so far outside the acceptable mainstream that there is no chance they will ever be discussed seriously in public by anyone but myself.
The only people who do listen to me – aside from a small cadre of fans whom I like to imagine idling around Other Music in New York waiting for the next Charlemagne Palestine CD to arrive – are the musicologists. I am in possession of historical data for which they have no other current source, and my description of a 1930s populism resurfacing in 1980s Manhattan piques their curiosity, not their terror. The musicologists, realizing circa 1983 that their profession’s reputation was stale and dowdy, revolutionized their field, and are now at the apogee of their powers. Composers, by contrast, enjoyed their hour of maximum prestige in the ’60s, and are straining every ideological sinew to extend that moment into eternity, and forestall the passage of time. There exists perhaps a real danger that my account of late-20th-century American music will get accepted into the history books in some form or another, for the lack of any attempted alternative narrative. But that’s hardly my fault. I wield no weight except for whatever persuasiveness I can muster in prose. I have no institutional support, am buoyed by no prizes or awards of any note. I’m just a blogger, but for some reason a threat to Western civilization.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A friend who got her doctorate in the ’90s at a famous music department told me yesterday that the faculty criticized her music for having too many articulated downbeats (notes occuring on the first beat of the measure) and not enough quintuplets. From the point of view of traditional musicality that is absolutely bizarre – imagine Mozart submitted to such criteria – but from the point of view of the composing world’s Conventional Wisdom, the “Elliott Carter got it Right” mentality, it makes a certain perverse sense. Some of us find this Conventional Wisdom twisted, neurotic, cramped, dogmatic, fascistic, counterintuitive, self-defeating, and sick. We gather here at PostClassic to get away from it, as gays go into a gay bar, and we don’t need academia’s Religious Right trailing in after us in to give us the same lectures we’re trying to escape from. If you’ve bought into the Conventional Wisdom, you have the entire rest of the composing world to roam around in, and heads will nod wherever you speak. Why isn’t that enough? Why are you compelled to try to change PostClassic too? What is it about a little modicum of marginalized diversity that threatens you so much?
I’m determined not to shut down the comments feature, but I am going to take a heavier hand from now on in deleting comments that demonstrate ignorance of the context here, and would therefore take way too long to answer. Those commenters will be referred to this post, and any other summational ones I feel moved to write. I am not obligated to provide yet another platform for the Conventional Wisdom. If that’s all you’ve got to throw at us, the rest of the classical music world’s your oyster, bub.
View from Outside the Cage
What strikes me in rereading through vast swaths of Cage is how subjective his viewpoint is. He was always advocating pure objectivity, getting away from his likes and dislikes, but his underlying reasons for such advocacy seem to boil down to: he just liked it that way. This is not the impression I took away at 15. Cage was so tied into Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller and Joseph Campbell and everything hip that he seemed to be laying the groundwork for a permanent new paradigm shift – and woe to the loser who didn’t get on board. By upbringing and happy accident Cage preferred optimisim to pessimism, nature to personality, acoustics to metaphor, and therefore we must all prefer them too. But now I’m noticing how often his recipes for the new music ultimately get attributed, frankly, to his personal taste. I’ve started a running list of his comments in which he justified his mandates subjectively. Take the following passage, written in defensive reply to a negative 1956 review by Paul Henry Lang, and oft-quoted these days in explication of 4’33”:
For “art” and “music,” when anthropocentric, (involved in self-expression) seem trivial and lacking in urgency to me. We live in a world where there are things as well as people. Trees, stones, water, everything is expressive… Life goes on very well without me, and that will explain to you my silent piece, 4’33”, which you may also have found unacceptable.
Well, I’m with him when he rejects self-expression as a major artistic motivation. But then he takes a speciously logical but nevertheless flying leap onto the extremely thin ice of equating self-expression with anthropocentrism. What, to deal with human concerns in my music means I’m merely “expressing myself”? The only possible escape from narcissistic expression of one’s momentary emotions is to leapfrog over the entire human race altogether and write music from the standpoint of rocks and trees? This catapults out a considerable army of babies with relatively few liters of bath water.Â
Now, the attempt to de-anthropomorphize music was a fascinating project, and for a few decades it vastly enlivened the experimental music scene, as a fertile source of new processes and perceptions. I have nothing whatever to say against it. Nevertheless, most music is made by humans for the purpose of being listened to by other humans, and to posit that there is now something unworthy or inauthentic about embedding anthropocentric concerns in one’s music would be to impose stringent limitations indeed. But so it goes, with Cage endlessly elevating his personal preferences into universals, quoting Thoreau and Coomarasamy and Meister Eckhardt to mean things they never would have supported in a million years. Thus, after 1955, a painting can only be truly “modern” if it is not destroyed by the presence of dust and shadows, and only music can be truly of our time that is in no way interrupted by the noises of traffic or a crying baby. Yet I possess an otherwise wonderful 1982 Harold Budd recording rendered unlistenable by a crying baby, and I know very few composers, even ones tremendously grateful to Cage, who wouldn’t be upset by having one of their recordings marred by outside noises.
I don’t in any way mean to imply that Cage was dishonest, or even presumptuous. It is every artist’s prerogative to make a public case that his or her own aesthetic is currently the best or hippest one on the market, and more power to him or her for being a good salesman. It was the style of the time to draw universals from one’s personal preferences (something that the more relativistic composers of my own generation have noticeably refused to do). Boulez elevated his personal concerns into formulations of a new law, so did Stockhausen, so did Babbitt. If Cage’s case differs from theirs, it was in that the aesthetic he pompously attempted to impose on the world was so much more cheerful, humbler, less authoritarian, so much more open to amateurs, so much more accepting of everyday life, that one felt almost churlish in opposing it – though in the end it was every bit as subjective and contingent. That was the source of his incredible presuasiveness. His cheery, out-of-left-field openness made one yearn to agree with him, even when his pronouncements provoked an internal reaction of, “Yyyyyyyyeah, wellllllllll, buuuuuut….” His justifications provoked smiles, but didn’t, in themselves, allow for the fact that historical pendulums, having swung one way, swing back, and that the variety of human psychology is infinite. His objectivity came as a breath of fresh air after a subjective era, but to draw the seemingly invited implication that humans didn’t need both sides would have been ridiculous.Â
And actually I believe that Cage, as a person, recognized this. After the 1990 premiere of my I’itoi Variations – as un-Cagean a piece as one might care to write – he came up and complimented me warmly. The sometimes austere desiderata expressed in his books did not limit his personal relationships.Â
All I’m saying, in fact, is that Cage was in no way what he has so often been called: a philosopher. He created a remarkable illusion that he had reached some kind of Ground Zero of artistic experience. But the illusion that his new “philosophy” now exposed Beethoven, Mahler, and jazz as frauds was one that very few people ever fell for, and it is difficult for a music lover today to avoid noticing the eccentricity of his preferences. In his music he scoped out large new areas that composition had never before occupied, and in his writings he justified his explorations with stunning articulateness. But actually, it was the MUSIC that justified his explorations (when it did), not the other way around. He made no ongoing objective survey of the philosophy or psychology of musical experience; instead, he wrote the music he felt compelled to write, and then wrote with astounding beauty about why he wrote it. A philosopher would have had to account for the attractiveness of music for which he had no sympathy. I’m more of a music-philosopher than Cage was, as was my late colleague Jonathan Kramer. A philosopher starts with some objective survey of aesthetic experience and, from it, derives musical principles. Cage, like most composers (and there is no reason to judge him harshly for it), went the well-traveled opposite direction. And, since he never claimed to be a philosopher, it is no reflection on him that he did not succeed in becoming one.
My own evaluation of Cage as a composer is that he has been somewhat overrated by his champions, and, of course, infinitely underrated by his detractors. There are pieces I’m dearly attached to from every Cagean period: In a Landscape (the permanent theme song of Postclassic Radio), Dream, The Seasons, Experiences Nos. 1 and 2, the 1950 String Quartet, Hymnkus, 74, Europeras 1 and 2. Some pieces are a blast to hear live: Credo in US, Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 (which I once conducted as a student at Oberlin). Others I just don’t care for at all, notably Atlas Eclipticalis and some of the late “number” pieces. I’m not a huge Sonatas and Interludes fan, but I respect it and am always glad to hear it. Variations 4 is an unforgettable paradigm for audio collage, while 4’33” and Music of Changes are historic landmarks (like Le Marteau and Gruppen), arguably more exciting to think about than to listen to. Etudes Australes is remarkably fun to play. In short, Cage was a composer, one of astonishing variety (and the usual unevenness).Â
As for his writings, the technicolor mushroom-lined road they mapped out for us all was really only for himself alone, though he made it sound so inviting that many like-minded individuals signed up for part of the journey. He introduced me to the I Ching and opened me up to an entire world of irrationality and natural complexity. (A random-number generator plays a walk-on role in a piece I’m writing right now.) His personal ethical example left a deep, deep mark on me, though his road itself proved too breezy a route for my darker, more solitary temperament. “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” But a philosopher? Not consistent enough. Not objective enough. Not rigorous enough.
Postminimalism: Chapter One, Metaphorically Speaking
Someday someone will appear who has analyzed more minimalist-influenced music from the 1980s and ’90s than I have, and if that person feels that I have divided my era into categories inappropriately, I will be glad to listen to her argument. So far, I’ve gotten plenty of argument, but only from people who don’t come anywhere close to fitting that description.
There are several ways to characterize a style. One is to catalogue all relevant qualities associated with pieces associated with that style. I’ve done this for postminimalism elsewhere, and I have no intention of replicating that feat today. Another, less cautious tactic is to isolate a compositional aim that one perceives as the essence of a style. This has the disadvantage of marginalizing (or at least discategorizing) pieces that do not manifest that particular idea, for artistic styles, it seems to me, are rarely homogenous in their makeup. Nevertheless, if I had to point to one characteristic that strikes me as quintessential to postminimalism, it would be the impulse to write music freely and intuitively within a markedly circumscribed set of materials, outside of which the piece “knows in advance” it will not venture. For me, and reinforced by the contemporaneous writings of Steve Reich, minimalism’s essence was its quasi-objectivity, its linear movement from one point to another, along with its adherence to audible process or structure. Postminimalism at once became much more subjective, often even mysterious, imitating minimalism’s extreme limitation of resources but replacing the idea of linear, audible structure with that of a nuanced, intuitive musical language.
For instance: Several movements of Bill Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978-79) fit this paradigm exactly. Not all of them, for Time Curve Preludes is something of a transitional work, and several movements preserve the idea of additive and subtractive process that I think of as continuing minimalist practice. Prelude No. 7 is a movement that strikes me as the postminimalist piece par excellence:
This languorous dance is made up of only three elements: a slowly arpeggiated bass line whose final dyad sometimes gets extended (A); a melody that here and there breaks the continuity (B); and a set of six chords that create an impression of bitonality by wandering conjunctly through scales from various keys, though the lower two lines are not actually diatonic (C):
There is some inheritance from minimalism here in the systematic way the phrase lengths expand at first according to lengths proportional to the Fibonacci series, but even this structural element recedes as the B melody intrudes more and more. You can listen to the movement here. I don’t think of the Time Curve Preludes as Bill’s best piece any more than I think of In C as Terry Riley’s best piece, but they are parallel in that they seem to be their respective composers’ most memorable pieces, the ones everyone knows, the ones whose perfectly clear intentions serve as a manifesto, of which their subsequent music works out the ramifications.
Even more restrictive in their materials are some of Peter Garland’s works. Here is an excerpt, mm. 19-23 (showing a transition between sections) from the second movement of his piano piece Jornada del Muerto (1987):
The entire movement employs only five chords in the right hand – given only as seen here, mind you, with no transpositions or octave displacements – plus the pitches B, D, and E in the left hand, usually as octaves, and in one section as single notes:
No process or continuity device informs this music; it is entirely and intuitively melodic in conception, if chordal in execution. Yet despite its extreme paucity of material, this lovely five-minute movement goes through seven sections touching on four different textures and rhythmic styles, undulating between two tempos. “I feel influenced,” Peter has said, “by American modernism from the ’20s, not the ’50s and ’60s. My take on modernism goes back to Cowell and Rudhyar.” Point taken: a line can be drawn from Garland’s use of only specific sonorities to the (vastly underrated) piano music of Rudhyar. Nevertheless, the conscious asceticism of his music is a far cry from Rudhyar’s employment of the entire piano as a mammoth sounding board, and it is worth noting that Peter studied at CalArts side by side with two other seminal postminimalists, Guy Klucevsek and John Luther Adams (all with Jim Tenney, who had his own postminimalist streak). In any case, the appearance of Jornada del Muerto in the late ’80s was exactly in keeping with the then-current postminimalist aesthetic. You can hear the second movement here.
Like Duckworth’s, Janice Giteck’s music is widely heterogenous in its sources of inspiration, but each movement blends those sources into a seamless fusion. The fourth movement of her Om Shanti (1986) draws inspiration from Indonesian gamelan music, and its melody, sung wordlessly by the soprano and doubled in various other instruments, runs along a pelog scale, F G B C E:
The piece is pervaded by a single line of 8th-notes running without interruption through the piano left hand and clarinet, all on those five pitches E F G B C, without ever repeating, like an endlessly flowing river that is never the same twice. In addition, the pitch A appears in the voice melody and its doublings, but only in the upper register and at moments of maximum intensity. At various points the melody is punctuated, as shown above, by one or two notes in the upper piano and crotales, always on the ambiguously unresolving pitch F, rendered even more unsettling by a bass note B in the cello (whose C string gets tuned down to B in the third movement, but that’s another story). The movement, which you can hear here, is a masterpiece of intuitive intensification of melody, texture, and even harmony within an invariant limited scale.
Merely five pitches also suffice for the nine-minute length and formal complexity of Paul Epstein’s Palindrome Variations (1995): G A Bb C D. The most formalist of them all, and a purveyor of note-by-note intricacy, Epstein could be called the Webern or Babbitt of postminimalism, the extremist in search of a purely musical logic. His 1986 Musical Quarterly article “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase” gives almost more insight into his own composing impulses than it does into its ostensive topic; he is fascinated by note combinations that result from permutational patterns. All the same, Palindrome Variations is not (as some Epstein pieces are) a work composed by linear process. What’s interesting about Epstein is that the musical units with which he works intuitively are not notes, chords, or even phrases, strictly speaking, but notational units resulting from the interplay of meter and repetition. Here, the 6-beat phrase of the first two measures (repeated in the second one) is rotated within the measure afterward, so that in m. 3 the pattern starts on the third beat, in m. 4 on the fourth, in m. 5 on the sixth, m. 2 on the second, and so on:
Of course, in so uniform a texture, the meter isn’t felt as a unit, and so the effect is a constant unpredictable juggling of the same elements over and over. By a nonlinear process of note substitutions, the texture gradually transforms into a canon in which all instruments are playing the same motive but out of sync; then there are canonic solos for the flute and cello, and with inexplicable logic the piece moves to a conclusion foreshadowed by a dominant preparation and a convincingly logical, almost Bartokian, closing move to unison melody, all without any perceived breaks in Epstein’s tightly wound motivic flow. You can hear all that here. I think of Epstein as music’s answer to an op artist like Bridget Riley, whose superficially strict procedures result in wildly expressive visual surprises; similarly, Epstein’s rigorous attention to geometric detail creates conundrums for the ear. I doubt anyone can deny that, like Babbitt within the 12-tone world, he sets a certain edge beyond which postminimalism can go no further.
The first 25 measures of Belinda Reynolds’s Cover (1996) certainly seem to be those of a postminimalist piece. Again, only six pitches are used – E F# G A# B D# – with E in the piano as a low drone note, and a certain obsessive reiteration of characteristic figures, particularly the competing fifths E-B and D#-A# (repeat sign not in the original, but mm. 3 and 4 are identical to 1 and 2):
However, the music crescendoes to a sudden new chord at m. 26, and subsequently every few measures the music ups the energy by shifting to a new scale. There might be no reason to call this curvaceous, quasi-organic piece postminimalist except that, within each “moment” (to use the Stockhausenesque term), it tends to build up pitch sets and melodies additively, starting as an undulation of two notes and adding in others, almost like a memory of minimalism. Ultimately, Cover‘s form is not postminimalist – there are no more implied limitations on where the music could go than there are in Mozart – but its technique is. One of the advantages of defining postminimalism (or any style) in terms of its central idea is that we can treat the style itself as an ideal form, and talk about degrees to which a particular piece participates in that style. Just as Time Curve Preludes lies slightly on one side of postminimalism, coming from minimalism, Cover is a piece evolving from postminimalism and leaving it behind toward something else, but with its origins still much in evidence. You can hear the entire ten-minute work here.
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Now, don’t write in and tell me you don’t like these pieces. Who cares if you like these pieces? Do I care if you like these pieces? Do I, Kyle Gann, personally give a shit whether you like these pieces? No. No, my friend. I do not. What I care about is that you acknowledge that these pieces by different composers with very different creative personalities share several very clear stylistic characteristics – that they, in effect, define a style. What we name that style, I do not care. If everyone wants to call it Charlie, we can call it Charlie. But I have called it postminimalism, because that word was already in use in the early ’80s but floating around loose without any specific definition. (Rob Schwarz applied the word to John Adams and Meredith Monk in his Minimalists book of 1996. But I have trouble finding important differences in method between Meredith and the true minimalists, while composers of the “neoromanticism with minimalist elements” style that Adams represents were vastly outnumbered in the ’80s by the postminimalists who fit my definition. There are many more of them today.) And it is clear that these composers were all reacting to minimalism, but that minimalism was not their only influence. They defined, among them, a soundworld quite different from minimalism, one of brevity rather than attention-challenging length and stasis, one of intuitive lyricism and mysticism rather than obvious structure and worship of “natural” processes.
Nor – to preclude the kind of silly clichés that some composers bring to these discussions – is postminimalism a “club” that anyone ever decided to join. Not one of these composers ever sat down and said, “I’m going to write a postminimalist piece,” and it would be surprising if anyone (aside from myself) ever has. Anyone who thinks there could be a “doctrinaire” postminimalist doesn’t understand. The style is accompanied by no ideology. Nor was postminimalism even a “scene.” Duckworth and Giteck were unaware of each other until I introduced them. I doubt Peter Garland has crossed paths with Belinda Reynolds to this day. Minimalism unleashed a set, or several sets, of potentialities into the ether, and, in the way that great minds so often think alike, several dozen composers pulled new musical solutions out of the air that happened to have a lot in common. The grouping of these composers into a postminimalist style is not a fact of composition, but a fact of musicology. It is the perception of the first person to study all this music – and I have hundreds more examples where these came from, don’t even get me started on my John Luther Adams file – that commonalities among a certain body of pieces constitute a style. That perception will stand (and has already been widely quoted in the literature) until it is replaced by a more compelling perception, as perhaps will happen someday. This remains true even despite the music world’s refusal to deal with this music as a repertoire, after the vogue it enjoyed temporarily among the New Music America crowd in the mid-1980s.
I wonder if that indifference is perhaps due to postminimalism’s generally formalist concerns, its fascination with pattern and texture, at a time when the music world had become totally disenchanted with formalism. The widespread abandonment of serialism around 1988 (the year it seemed to me that disgust with the 12-tone idea reached a tipping point) inspired a near-universal move toward social relevance and widespread appropriation of pop and world-music elements, a conviction that music should refer to the world and not only to its own processes. Totalism, the other big movement that branched off from minimalism, throve much better in the post-serial milieu, as evident in the more visible careers of the Bang on a Can composers. In many respects, postminimalism was an answer to serialism far more than minimalism was. The postminimalists, like the serialists, worked at creating self-sufficient and self-consistent musical languages, in this case a language in which the reduction of musical elements made musical logic apparent. The attitude was almost, “Let’s do formalism over again and get it right this time, not anxious and apocalyptic and opaque like the serialists, but transparent and lyrical and pleasant.”
By 1990, however, formalism of any kind was a hard sell. Justifiably tired of music that begged for technical analysis, the world wanted big, messy Julian Schnabels of music, not clean, pristine Bridget Rileys. It was, and remains, difficult to argue for music so focused on its own musical processes, no matter how pleasant to the ear. In fact, postminimalism’s very pleasantness works against it: in the macho music world that John Zorn ushered in and the faux-blue-collar Bang-on-a-Canners have continued, postminimalism has never seemed kickass enough, its archetypes too feminine and conciliatory. (Kickass, kickass, kickass… I remember with perverse pleasure how ridiculously frequently that word came to everyone’s lips in the New York scene of the late ’80s, as though they had suffered some dire threat to their collective masculinity, and how easy it was to make fun of.) But pendulums swing, fashions change, and at some point the music world will remember that notes themselves can be made into patterns fascinating to listen to for their own sake. When that time arrives, the beautiful, varied, surprising postminimalist repertoire will be here to be rediscovered.
UPDATE: My little tirade above earned me a very funny comparison with Milton Babbitt via Darcy James Argue. Part of what’s funny is that the Babbitt paragraph he quotes is one I happen to have always agreed with. Babbitt’s a smart man, and not wrong all the time.
The Masses Speak, and Wisely
Good lord, what a superb crop of comments my last post elicited! I seem to have stumbled on a topic – the mandates of “historical progress” – that many composers think about a lot and rarely get to discuss. My readers have outdone themselves, most beyond my capacity to improve on with further comment, notably Galen Brown’s points about film music. But I’ll respond to a few.
Matthew Guerrieri (whose thoughtful blog is worth checking out) pinpoints a dilemma that often has me dancing around in circles:
It’s not so much the choice of vocabulary (out of the composers I went to school with, I can only think of one who wrote in a classic mid-century serialist style; the rest of us were too in love with John Williams to ever give up tonal centers) as the attitude among a lot of student composers that they simply don’t need to know anything about non-tonal music that I find ridiculous. If you already think you know everything you need to know, what are you doing in school? And I’m deeply skeptical of any composer who isn’t curious about the inner workings of every single piece he or she comes in contact with–and who doesn’t constantly re-listen, and reassess, the entire repertoire. (If I had settled on my 19-year-old opinions, I would like neither Brahms, Barraque, or soul music.)
It’s a big problem for me: at one point I rejected the premises of serialist and related music, but it was tremendously important in my development, and I still love a lot of it. So how do you teach a body of music that you’ve rejected as a creative artist, but still feel your students need to encounter and learn to understand, especially when the music exhibits a difficulty that raises automatic resistance in most of them, and seems so irrelevant to their prior interests?
This morning I went to Patelson’s Music in New York and bought the score to the fifth movement of Boulez’s Pli selon pli – for $100, which means I now own scores to four of the five movements, at considerable financial commitment – along with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Wuorinen’s Piano Sonata, and Ligeti’s Continuum (not one of my favorites, but only ten bucks and a great teaching piece). Though I criticize a lot of this music, you can’t say my attitude is unaffectionate, let alone unknowledgeable. It bugs me when I don’t know how a piece works, or don’t understand why it was written, and I study the music that perplexes me. I want my students to learn to do the same. I teach lots of serialist music, and present it as enthusiastically as I can, though I make it clear that, as with any body of music, there is a wide range of quality. I love Babbitt’s Philomel, sort of like his Canonical Form, and don’t care for Sextets. Nono’s Contrappunto Dialettico alla Mente is fantastic, but Il Canto Sospeso leaves me cold. Stockhausen’s Mantra is terrific, and I enjoy Kontrapunkte, but I wouldn’t bother playing the first four Klavierstücke. The first two movements of Carter’s Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harspichord are lodged in my heart, but his Variations for Orchestra seems empty and clichéd.
Ultimately, I believe it’s high time to treat this music like any other historical repertoire. My students need to learn all the subtleties of sonata form, too, though Schumann and Brahms are difficult to interest them in. The difference between me and some of my colleagues is that I immerse them in the music – and then don’t bother them about whether they want to apply anything they’ve learned from it to their own music. As trained musicians they have to understand why it was important to write this music, but as artists, they are free to ignore not only it, but all “historical progress,” and anything else that doesn’t touch them deeply. Still, the question, “Well, if this music is so freakin’ wonderful, why doesn’t your music resemble it in any way?” – can be difficult to evade.
Guerrieri adds:
I always get my best ideas when I’m sitting through a piece I don’t like: I start to think of all the sounds I’d rather be hearing, and the imagination takes off. I know at least a couple colleagues who have had the same experience. Are we the only ones?
Absolutely not. I find nothing more inspiring than sitting in a concert and listening to bad music. As a critic-composer, I’ve started some of my best pieces while listening to music that bored or disgusted me. Often when it looked like I was taking copious notes, I was actually drawing staves in my little notebook and sketching out chords and melodies in a burst of anti-cliché inspiration. The opportunity to hear lousy music live is greatly underrated.
The always sincere John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop confesses:
I’m uncomfortable with the equation of aesthetic esotericism and political conservatism.
There’s nothing “elitist” about esoteric interests. But feeling bitter that “the masses” don’t share your esoteric interests does reflect — or lead one to — an elitist attitude.
I will have to ponder for a while, uncomfortably, why Aaron Copland may have felt that esoteric aesthetics were akin to political conservatism, and why he may have been justified at that time.
Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that so many of these guys are politically liberal, yet manifest such authoritarian views in their music, or at least in the rhetoric with which they surround it. If a composer is fascinated by esoteric musical goals, but humbly realizes that his perceptions lie outside the range of the average listener, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable attitude. That seems true of many of the best “advanced” composers: Nancarrow, Scelsi, Sorabji, even Partch. But the serialists, and the New Complexity guys who inherited their hubris, often sound like the musical equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld: “We’re the experts, we know what’s best, so just shut up and take what we give you, and if you’re smart you’ll learn to appreciate the bold new world we’ve created for you.” And that bold new world, whether Rumsfeld’s or Wuorinen’s, is usually a hell based on theories that they’ve done a great job of rationalizing for themselves, but that are based on self-delusions that most people have too much common sense to accept. Given the assumption that their political views are sincere (though I’ve been told that Wuorinen and Babbitt express horribly right-wing opinions in private), I can’t imagine how they reconcile that for themselves, or even how they look themselves in the mirror each morning. It’s true, too, of not only the serialists (nearly extinct at this point, after all), but of my immediate colleagues who insist that their students use the proper modicum of “20th-century-sounding” dissonance, atonality, and pitch complexity whether it expresses what they want to say or not.
Finally, Ryan Howard asks:
I’m curious what you make of Charles Rosen’s comments (in Piano Notes) of what he terms “neotonal” music. Rosen seems to advance the argument that the gradual move toward equal temperament destroyed one of the fundamental elements of 18th century tonality–the directionality of modulation in either the sharp or flat direction–and that “neotonal” music, consequently, can provide only a “hollow simulacrum” of 18th or 19th century tonality, in which classical tonal structures are “either abandoned or given a simplistic form which does not recognize the emotional intensity of full triadic tonality.”
Unlike some of Rosen’s comments about 20th-century music, I think this is a really profound point, and one that many microtonalists have made in one way or another as well. Lou Harrison liked to say that 12-tone music was the only style that 12-tone equal temperament supports. I myself gravitated toward microtonality partly because I was so interested in minimalism, and I always get a gnawing feeling that a lot of Reich’s and other minimalist music (Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, for instance) would sound so much better in meantone or just intonation. Those of us not attracted to writing strictly atonal music confront an unconscious conflict, I believe, in the fact that the conventional tuning we use is at odds with the underlying meaning of the harmonies we use. My non-microtonal music (which is most of it) has been influenced to some extent by my work in just intonation, but not as pervasively as I’d like. When writing piano music, for instance, I often revert to a considerable amount of half-step clashes because simple harmonies just don’t sound that good on a modern piano. It’s a problem – one my teacher Ben Johnston feels is well-nigh insurmountable until we start moving away from the bland out-of-tuneness of modern 12-pitch tuning.
Thanks to all for a fascinating dialogue.
Vinyl Reunion
Perhaps a deluge of unpopular opinions foreshadowed a deluge of unwelcome waters, but this August 29 – the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – is also the third anniversary of the debut of my blog. On the last anniversary, as New Orleans braced for the worst, I announced that I had written fewer blog entries in my second year than my first, and that the third would doubtless exhibit a further decline. This year I have an opposite announcement: despite my August slump, I have written more blog entries than in either of the previous years, and on the average they have been considerably longer. I complained last year that I was unable to back up my unpopular opinions with musical examples. That difficulty has been overcome. Meanwhile, my readership has expanded enormously. (Many readers report a weight gain of 30 to 40 pounds, which I can only attribute to their absent-mindedly munching down doughnuts while absorbed in my totalist analyses.)
I sometimes wonder why I blog and what good it does me, but there have been occasions on which the advantages are quite apparent, and in which I have been overcome by gratitude to my readers. Upon my mentioning an admiration for the Danish composer Per Norgard, reader Christopher Culver directed me to a web site that drew me far closer to an understanding of that master’s most characteristic music. And recently David DeMaris drew my attention to the software Click Repair ($25), which has allowed me to transfer my record collection into playable form. I had long been recording records on CDs, but Click Repair removes all the pops and clicks, and make me forget that I’m listening to a recording of a vinyl record. I have since transferred several dozen records to CDs and MP3s, with tremendous psychological impact. A lot of my records, pressed on substandard vinyl in the early ’80s, have never been listenable, and I’m suddenly hearing them for the first time as they were intended. The musical tastes of my youth have sat for years in boxes and then in cabinets in a spare room, mute reminders of the influences that formed me. All of a sudden they’re back, pristinely recorded, as though I inherited the CD collection of someone with remarkably similar tastes.
It’s always been an observation of mine that music professors have very different musical tastes than record critics, and that I possess that of the latter. Academics harbor a conceit that only the very best music is worth listening to – Brahms, Schoenberg, Berg, Ligeti, and then Brahms again – and that anything lesser is almost contaminating. Record critics are far more catholic, and pervasively doubt that history has done its job unearthing the best music. Carl Nielsen is one of the most delightful and underrated composers of all time. Franz Berwald is one of the great Romantics; Liszt predicted that he would never be appreciated during his lifetime, but opined that he was highly original and should keep composing. Max Reger wrote some incredible music, stretching tonality to the breaking point, and achieving far more subtle effects than Schoenberg. There is no Dvorak symphony I love listening to as much as the “Easter” Symphony of Josef Bohuslav Foerster: and yet, no other Foerster symphonies are recorded, so I can’t find out for myself whether that work is an anomaly. A couple of my favorite piano concertos ever are by Hummel. The music of the short-lived Hermann Goetz was championed by Bernard Shaw, and his symphony and chamber music are similar to Mendelssohn, only livelier. Muzio Clementi’s late sonatas are unbelievable, fantastic, yet he remains known only for those stupid sonatinas. The inordinately subtle Jan Ladislav Dussek is listed as a Romantic, a post-Beethoven composer, even though he was born ten years earlier than Beethoven – incredible. Ferruccio Busoni, of course, is one of my favorite composers, and my own music contains several homages to him. Other composers are less compelling, but I made it a point to seek them out: Sir Arnold Bax, Hans Erich Apostel, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Lord Berners, Alexander Zemlinsky, Cyril Scott, Franz Schmidt (whose Fourth Symphony and Piano Quintet are magnificent, but Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln? Don’t bother).
These are all names one never encounters in academia – nor in American concertgoing, unfortunately – but that record critics scarf up by the bundle. The strange thing is, I didn’t get interested in them because I became a critic – I was already seeking them out in college. If there’s anything that has characterized every move I’ve made as a musician, it is a kneejerk distrust for the mechanisms by which composers become famous. The routes by which composers gain visibility in the orchestra circuit today are patently bogus, and I suspect it was more or less ever thus. I don’t know whether I will ever have opportunity to teach these names in the classroom; it’s difficult to justify analyzing Berwald’s Simphonie Singulaire, remarkable as it is, to students who don’t know Schumann yet. But I love listening to them, and they contributed something to my musical personality, Nielsen, Reger, and Busoni most of all. For 20 years much of this wonderful music has been sitting mutely in my vinyl collection, inciting waves of nostaglia whenever I glance into what I call my “vinyl room.” Now it’s unleashed, with pops and clicks erased. It’s been like a college reunion, and I’m thrilled to have them back.
There’ll Always Be an England
I bought, because a reader recommended it, The Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers (1999), by Mark Morris – not the famous dancer, of course, but a Welsh music critic resident in Canada. It is organized by country, which creates some curious ambiguities: for instance, Foss is listed under the U.S.A. and Wolpe under Germany, even though both were born in Germany and emigrated to America. (I think of Wolpe’s late music as highly American, while Foss retains his German accent.) But it has certain advantages, such as listing Iceland’s Thorkall Sigurbjörnsson, New Zealand’s Douglas Lilburn, and Norway’s unfortunate and distinctly underrated Geirr Tveitt, whom most survey histories are unlikely to mention at all.
What’s interesting is the opportunity to see our music world in an exceedingly British mirror. For example, this comment in the section on the U.S.A.:
“It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in terms of musical impact, and in the reflection of the wider human condition and the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day, none of the American composers has yet matched their European counterparts.”
This is refreshingly frank, and brings up two Eurocentric criteria with which I might have been sympathetic when I was 20, before I became more acclimated to the changes that came with postmodernism. On one hand we have “the wider human condition,” i.e., the programmatic holdover from Romanticism that music is supposed to encapsulate some echo of the bourgeois man’s relation to society. On the other, “the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day,” which seems to reflect a modernist belief that the Hegelian World Spirit, moving ever westward (and stopping for the time being in London, at least until the trains are in better repair), is embodied in a mainstream of music on which all “serious” composers must comment, and to which they all contribute. No dirty rumor of “pluralism” taints these pages. British composers, from that country which the Germans used to call “das land ohne musik,” occupy 72 pages; Americans only 50; Germany gets 49, and Russia 45. Harry Partch, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman (the most influential composer of the last 25 years) are mentioned only in passing, not granted separate entries, while the names Conlon Nancarrow and Robert Ashley appear nowhere. Meanwhile, the entry on the United Kingdom begins, “The history of British music in the 20th century is a remarkable one,” and includes separate essays on William Alwyn, Ivor Bertie Gurney, Daniel Jenkyn Jones, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams, all of whom surely outrank the marginal Feldman.
To an extent, the book indeed complements my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. But I have trouble thinking how I’ll explain away its anglophile exaggerations, and I have ended up taking Paul Griffiths’ more equitable Modern Music and After for my 20th-century music survey class.
The French Disappearance
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest song title ever was that of Hoagy Carmichael’s 1945 ditty, “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues.” I think I may possibly hold the record for the longest title of an orchestra piece: The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World. Like several of my titles, it’s a line from a poem by the great underrated poet Kenneth Patchen. The piece is being played next Thursday, June 15, in Paris, conducted by Elizabeth Askren on a program of American music:
It’s the work’s first performance since the premieres by the Woodstock Orchestra in 1998. I, alas, won’t be there. But I’m having such a blast making microtonal orchestras with Li’l Miss Scale Oven and Kontakt 2.1 that it would take more than a mere Continental premiere to crowbar me away from my computers.
UPDATE: Art Jarvinen says he has a chamber orchestra piece with a longer title: Mass Death Of A School Of Small Herring (The Natural History Of Deductible Rooms). Personally, I think having a subtitle in parens is cheating.
Look Who’s Popular
An interesting sidelight to our little dodecaphonic discussion (trying to avoid the 3 x 4 number) is the recurrence of the name Luigi Dallapiccola. One hardly ever sees this name on concert programs – Leon Botstein conducted Canti di Prigionia and Canti di Liberatione a year or so ago, and past that I think I have to go back to the ’80s to remember a live performance – and his major works can be impossible to find on recording. So I go along thinking that I’m one of the few who thinks that Dallapiccola wrote better 12-tone music (oops) than Schoenberg, Webern, or Berg, but stoke the coals a little and a lot of sparks fly up. Turns out I’m not at all alone in that opinion.
I admit I find Dallapiccola uneven (like just about everyone else, I guess). One side of his work is sensuous, elegant, transcendant: Piccola Musica Notturna, Sex Carmina Alcaei, Canti di Prigionia, Preghiere, Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi. Another side I find overcomplicated and a little strident: Canti di Liberatione, Tempus Destruendi/Tempus Aedificandi. But the balance is on the transcendent side, and unlike with most 2nd Va. Sch. music, I don’t think about its construction when I listen to it. Also, like Berg only more patently so, he’s sometimes refreshingly anti-purist: in Canti di Prigionia he weaves a 12-tone row around the Dies Irae, with enchanting effect. So why isn’t his music more commonly encountered? Simply because there’s little resemblance between the music world and an actual meritocracy? In any case, the frequency with which his name has come up lately elects him into the Academy d’Underrated by acclamation.
(In Piccola Musica Notturna Dallapiccola calls for a tam-tam piccolo, and one of my best students asked, “Is that like a regular piccolo?” I had to remind her that “piccolo” means “little” in Italian, and that that probably meant a small tam-tam. We did, however, briefly consider the possibility that it was a piccolo struck with a mallet. But I digress.)