PostClassic: April 2009 Archives

Lately, though, I've felt that my music has ridden rationalism to the end of the line, and I've got little left to say about it. It's not that I feel my future musical goals are less clear, but that I can no longer articulate them. The multitempo and microtonal structures I've come up with through study and experimentation are still, I think, interesting, but their interestingness is beginning to get in the way. It's time for them to fade into the background, and to simply be there in the service of something inchoate, something I can't specify because if I could specify it, it wouldn't surprise me the way I want it to. So I've reached the point at which a lot of musicians always have been, who can't bear to say why they're writing music or what they want it to do. And I, long-time maven of blindingly logical artistic statements, am feeling the unfamiliar suspicion that artistic statements aren't of much value. It seems to vary by field, possibly by age; I read a lot of visual artist statements, and they always seem able, even driven, to scope out some field of exploration whose premises they can explain. In recent visual art, the work and the explanation even seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps younger artists should need to explain where they're headed better than older artists with larger portfolios need to - but to conclude that would be merely to extrapolate from my own possibly idiosyncratic experience. Now I find myself having a hippie-ish, totally uncharacteristic urge to just write "My music is..." and then leave it blank, or draw a psychedelic picture or something. 

But here's what I came up with under duress, partly remembered from the kinds of things I used to write:

I'm not as impressed as I used to be.

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? 

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.

As a critic and musicologist, I've done just about everything I could think of to champion women composers. While at the Voice, I sometimes would try to see how many consecutive weekly columns I could write about women; four was as far as I once got before encountering a week with no appropriate woman composer concert. As a master artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, I got to pick my own associate composers, and chose four men and four women. When I took over the "American Composer" column at Chamber Music magazine, I was given a list of 70 previous subjects of columns by my predecessors: to my horror, 67 were men, only three women. Since then I have profiled 50 composers, 25 of them women, more than octupling their presence in the magazine. Dozens of women are given paragraphs or sections in my American Music in the 20th Century. (I heard that when Claude Palisca was criticized for having no women in his History of Western Music, he asked, "Are there any?") Yet I notice that when women composers are omitted from an event, complaints are inevitable; when women are abundantly included, compliments or any other notice are almost unheard of. People shouldn't expect compliments for doing what they ought to do anyway, and I don't, but perhaps an attempt to redress the situation might be more effective if it included carrots as well as sticks.

UPDATE: For further elaboration of "a carrot," read Comment #2.

- In my 20th-century orchestral repertoire class I happened to start teaching the minimalists on the same day I finished up the style-mixing postmodernists, like Bolcom, Rochberg, Del Tredici, Jonathan Kramer. And it occurred to me what they have in common. Both groups place the locus of innovation (I can still write fluent academese when I need to, though the Voice trained me out of it and I have no desire to start up again) - both rely for a sense of newness on the amount and variety of information in their pieces, contrasting it with the general information rate and stylistic variety range of the typical classical piece. The minimalists pare down the information to give you less than classical listeners would expect. The postmodernists ramp up the information variety so that you've got Mozart quotes, country and western licks, Romantic clichés, jazz all bubbling around in the same mix. There remain, of course, many composers for whom the information rate of classical music is still an abiding paradigm, but the minimalists and postmodernists likewise rebelled against the general rhetoric of classical music - one group by narrowing the focus, the other by widening it. Diametrically opposed as the two reactions are, I sense a certain kinship there, a tiredness with the repetitiveness of the classical music experience.

- Wagner's spinning of Tristan und Isolde out of a dramatically small group of materials - the Tristan chord, deceptive cadences, and French sixths morphing into dominant sevenths that never conclusively resolve - of course led the way to atonality, a divorce from the universal syntax of the common practice period, and 12-tone music's tendency to derive every element from a single row. More than that, though, I think it destroyed an overall faith in a commonly shared, objective musical language and created - indeed, privileged - a paradigm by which the composer creates his or her own universe for each work. This, seems to me, is what separates the New Tonality from the old. I write a lot of tonal music, but I never plunge into the whole syntax of V-I cadences, circle-of-fifths progressions, and all that stuff one learns in school: for each piece I choose what elements, some familiar and some piquant, that will constitute my language for that work. One can certainly say this for postminimalism in general, and I imagine for other New Tonal music as well. Wagner's stripping his Tristan music of so many of tonal music's usual signifiers was (forgive me for putting it this way) a proto-postminimalist gesture, or perhaps we should just say minimalist: a virtuoso determination to draw as much length and variety as possible from an artificially circumscribed set of chords and voice-leadings. 

In this sense I feel as a composer that I still inhabit a post-Tristan world more than I do, say, a post-Rite of Spring world. The expansion and increased systematization of materials ushered in by Le Sacre strikes me (when composing) as a little musty and superceded by this point. But Tristan seems like a forever-locked door, beyond which one could never again return to a non-contextual common language whose references could be drawn from a vocabulary not created within the piece itself.