Kyle Gann on music after the fact
This is late notice, but my son is supposedly on television tonight. His black metal band Liturgy is being used in the plot of the cop show The Blacklist, the episode featuring Peter Fonda as guest star. Fonda supposedly appears as a drummer in the band. No idea yet whether they’ll be on for 10 seconds or three minutes, but they filmed. I don’t have TV reception, so somebody please know what happened if you watch it. Thanks.
[UPDATE:] Well, somebody noticed, anyway.
One of my students decided not to apply to a certain grad school because it had too many white men with dreadlocks in one department. I agreed that that was probably indicative of a certain aesthetic narrowness.
I am in receipt of James Klosty’s handsome new coffee-table volume John Cage Was, a book of photographs of John Cage, many of them rare and unseen before, all of them telling. For the margins Klosty asked a lot of people connected with Cage to write descriptions of him of a hundred words or less, using the words “John Cage was….” For those who are unlikely to shell out for the book, here’s what I wrote:
John Cage was the figure who, for thousands of musicians, opened the door to the world beyond rationality. By introducing us to the I Ching, and showing us how to use it both artistically and practically, he made it seem safe and creative and irresistible to explore not only Eastern thought and Buddhism, but astrology, Tarot, Jungian theory, and any discipline based in an ineffable synchronicity. He freed us to not understand what we were doing, and making art has been more interesting ever since.
In college I did indeed spend years consulting the I Ching, though I found it rather opaque, and never settled into it well; it seemed to be forever telling me that “it furthers one to cross the great water.” In retrospect, I guess it was directing me to expatriate to Europe posthaste, and I wish I’d complied. Tarot cards (which Cage used in composing 4’33”, though no one knows how) I found attractive, and still do, but wasn’t intuitive enough to interpret them with any subtlety. Astrology was the synchronicity system that clicked with my mathematical brain. I once consulted with Cage’s astrologer, Julie Winter, and many of the books I read on astrology early on were by another composer whose music I am devoted to, Dane Rudhyar. The new-agey/occult side of Cage’s influence gets whitewashed from his public persona, but for some of us it was explicit.
The faculty is once again rethinking the distribution requirements, the obstacle course of varied classes every student has to take to make sure they all have a more well-rounded education than I do. So we’re having meetings about how to pitch courses to non-majors. I enjoy these. My colleagues in literature, the sciences, and the social sciences are so brilliant, so eloquent and thoughtful, that I’ve come to realize that I’m not all that smart – I’m just really smart for a musician. Today they asked what one thing I would want a non-music-major to get out of one of my classes. As so often happens, my mouth started rattling before my brain was even engaged, and what it said was good enough: “I want every student to realize that it is possible to fall completely in love with a piece of music that he or she didn’t like at all the first time they heard it.”
Because this is what I’m having a lot of trouble with. The closed-mindedness of some of my students seems like the worst thing about my life these days, and if that’s the biggest tragedy I’ve got to deal with, I guess I’ll survive. I’m talking about my composition students. I am prepared for our opera singers to turn up their noses at Stockhausen and Nancarrow, but these are young composers refusing to give modern masterworks a third hearing (actually, one of my singers is bugging me for the most dissonant Ives songs I can give her). I’ll play the Concord Sonata, or Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, for a student, a music major, and they respond, “No no, I don’t like that, and I’m sure I never will.” Or I’ll play some astounding microtonal music, and they’ll say, “Oh, that just sounds out of tune, no one’s ever going to accept that.” No curiosity whatever, no openness, no wonder. Worse: it’s like, if they spend three hours listening to a 20- or 40-minute piece a few times, that’ll be three spoiled, precious hours of their life they’ll never get back. Or, maybe, if they learn to enjoy some peculiar-sounding piece, it will split them off from their peers, to whom they would have trouble relating the experience. I don’t get it. No one has ever called me un-opinionated, but when I was 18, I was going to be damned before I would admit that there was a piece of modern music in existence that I couldn’t understand. I’d listen to the same record a dozen times in a row until the piece started to make sense to me. I wasn’t committed to liking everything I heard, but I was going to understand every single piece well enough to understand why somebody liked it, even if I didn’t, and I was going to be able to articulate why, of all the complex and opaque pieces ever written, I’d decided I didn’t like this one. I withheld judgments for years, decades, until I felt I had done sufficient analysis to come to an opinion. After 20 years of full-time teaching, I’m still waiting to come across a student as totally committed to understanding the entire classical repertoire as I was at 18. Haven’t found one.
Part of the problem is that “the canon” carries no weight anymore (and little enough with me). Students come to school already knowing everything worth knowing, or so they think, having heard the first minute of thousands of mp3s, and with a calcified, corporate-determined idea of what is musically acceptable. With so many alternative histories of music available, why should mine be privileged? I like Giacinto Scelsi, but they like some hiphop artist I’ve never heard, so we’re even, right? But I’m the 59-year-old professor, and I can look back at the opinions I firmly held at age 20 with embarrassment and condescension. It alienates me from them. When they refuse to consider, despite detailed argument, that there may be incredible qualities in modern works that they haven’t understood yet, attempting to teach them becomes a tedious bore. What the hell are they in college for? Why am I baby-sitting people who aren’t impressed with my experience and opinion? Is this a generational thing? a product of iPod and internet culture? Why would smart, likable, upscale students be so determined that no one’s going to educate them?
And while I’m at it, get off my lawn.
“[Composer Rinaldo Di Capua] thinks composers have nothing to do now but to write themselves and others over again, and the only chance they have for obtaining the reputation of novelty or invention must arise either from the ignorance or want of memory in the public – as everything both in melody and modulation that is worth doing has already been done over and over again.”
– Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770
It’s every bit as true now as it was then.