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Here’s a question I asked myself, at one of the recent Irving Fine memorial concerts at the Library of Congress in DC.
Fine, I’ll say in passing, is one of those entirely respectable but not memorable composers whom — in a festival or retrospective — we all more or less pretend was more important than he was. But I don’t want to go into that here. Instead I want to ask the larger question that occured to me. Fine began as a neoclassicist, and then, in the 1950s, started writing 12-tone music. Why? Other American neoclassicists did the same. So, again, why? Why this move from a style that worked for them into something else? A move made not just by names we don’t vividly remember, but even by Copland and Stravinsky (not American, but he was living in the US).
This really is a conundrum, and one not addresssed in the program notes for the Fine events. All too typically — and, I fear, a sign of classical music’s estrangement from the outside world — most of the notes plunged deep into minutiae, without addressing the kind of larger questions, which, once asked, can plainly seem important.
As this one does. Why would composers having great success writing in a style accessible to audiences, move into one that’s sealed from both classical music, as most people experience it, and from the wider world?
Note! Please don’t think I’m dismissing 12-tone music. I’m simply stating what I think is a fact about it, not rejecting it aesthetically, or, especially, rejecting every 12-tone piece. I’ve written 12-tone music myself, and there are 12-tone works (the Webern Symphony, for instance, that I love.
If we go back to the beginning of 12-tone music, and ask why Schoenberg developed it, the answer is simple enough. In the middle of a collapsing world, he wanted stability. He felt (as he famously said) that writing free atonal music was like swimming in a boiling ocean. Twelve-tone music enabled him to work within a structure, so at any place in a piece he could tell himself what was happening. For him that replaced the equivalent certainties of tonal harmony.
It’s also clear why postwar Europeans — Boulez, Stockhausen, others — moved with such intensity into serial writing. In a world that had just been smashed, that in many places was literally lying in ruins, they felt freedom dawning, felt that serial writing opened exhilarating new possibilities, by creating (in an ecstatic phrase from Boulez) a “universe in perpetual expansion.” You can hear that in their music.
Turning back to the US, I can also sense how out-of-his-skin excited Elliott Carter must have been, early in the ‘50s, when he, too, moved from neoclassical writing into atonality, even if his atonality wasn’t 12-tone. For one thing, it was a kind of atonality he’d invented himself, in which many things could surge into being at once. His first string quartet — where he decisively made this move — seems imbued to me with wild excitement, with the discovery of new worlds, just as the first songs Elvis recorded, just a few years later, are.
And then, still in the US, I can see why Stravinsky, the most famous neoclassicist, in the same era, but older than the other composers I’m talking about, would have written 12-tone music. For him (or so it seems to me), 12-tone writing became a consummate late style, more consummate maybe even than Beethoven’s — completely his own, unlike anything else (certainly unlike other 12-tone music), and created with no thought of pleasing anyone but himself. Besides, he always liked building music from repeated patterns (think of the “Danse sacrale” from Rite of Spring, or the ecstatic circling of the same few notes at the end of Symphony of Psalms), so the repeated pitch patterns in 12-tone writing may well have been a joyful puzzle for him to solve.
Note! I’m not saying that repeated pitch patterns are all that 12-tone music is about. Or that solving technical puzzles is all that 12-tone composers care about. These notes are needed, I’m afraid, because 12-tone music is so badly understood, and so often badmouthed as by nature abstract or mechanical. It’s neither. But when you write it you do arrange, and rearrange, repeated patterns of pitches and intervals, and I can’t believe Stravinsky didn’t love doing that .
So now back to Irving Fine, and other American neoclassicists, for whom 12-tone music may not have been either ecstatic or immediately comfortable. Copland — of course the most loved and most successful of American neoclassicists (if you’ll forgive me for limiting him with any such label) — wrote 12-tone pieces that, to me, don’t feel like they’re happy in their new skin. Like otherwise good wine that somehow got constricted in its bottle.
Nor did I feel any challenge, any excitement, any joy or terror in conquering new worlds, in the 12-tone string quartet by Irving Fine that I heard. But of course he was a human being, with feelings, passions, needs. He had some reason to make this move. What was going on?
I’ll hazard a guess. Looking, I want to stress, at things the composers may not have thought about, or been aware of. Or in other words at the larger forces operating, as larger forces do, far in the background.
First, an important confluence of dates. Serial music emerged in the US at around the same time as rock & roll. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Rock & roll brought rebellious freedom, a lot of fun, a sense of cutting loose. And, most crucially, rock & roll brought us white kids listening to previously segregated black music, and thus created an eruption of nonwestern culture in the heart of the west, carrying with it a revised relationship of mind and body. In western culture, mind and body are opposed, with mind considered superior, and the body thought dangerous. Rock & roll frees the body (feel the rhythm, watch the dancing).
And serial music? Of course it takes us deep within the mind, and — with the irregular rhythms that after Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg (who were, in different ways, strongly rhythmic) came to prominence — subdues the pulsing of the body. As if, while rock & roll made our culture explode, 12-tone music tried to sustain the old ways, by burrowing more deeply within them than the old music did. (No last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh in 12-tone music, no “apotheosis of the dance.”)
So that might be one thing that was going on. While rock & roll went in one direction, a part of classical music with great prestige (even if it didn’t have any wide following) went the opposite way, as if to affirm everything rock & roll questioned.
And then there’s also something else, something clearly related. Up to World War II, classical music had some currency in popular American life. You could make a public cultural statement with it. Copland did, by using folk materials (Applachian Spring, etc.) during the Depression and afterward, when at least left-wing artists (as Copland was) felt that art should connect with broad masses of people. Copland also wanted to write film music.
In the ‘50s, all that started to recede. With the rise of rock & roll and television, there was an explosion of popular culture, in the face of which classical music began, ever so faintly, to recede. And to formalize itself. This, for instance, is when the rules about when to applaud became entrenched. Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, in their marvelous “Gay and lesbian music” entry in the New Grove, suggest that up until World War II, music was seen as somehow feminine, so that “powerful institutional forces had to be mobilzed to counteract that image, especially with the large-scale entry of music into the universities after World War II.” These forces included
The widespread adoption of neo-serialist technique, the development of arcane forms of music analysis, the separation of high art from any form of popular cultural expression and the equation of musical scholarship with scientific inquiry.…
A move toward 12-tone music thus helped to make musical composition more respectable. And it may also have done something else. Composers may have felt that they didn’t have the same relation to their audience, that in fact their relation with an audience was getting tenuous.
So what could they do? If they wrote 12-tone works, they were extending the art of music, doing God’s work (so to speak) in music history, doing something that, because of all the compositional rigor involved, didn’t need to be justified. The medium became the message: “Our work is important.”
That makes intuitive sense to me. What do others think?
There’s something else that might have influenced Copland. In the 1950s the U.S. was deep into the Cold War, opposing communism all over the world. Our adversary, the Soviet Union, forbade 12-tone music, along with modernist art in all its forms. Inside the US, things got ugly, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies could be in real trouble. Copland, because of his left-wing past, was in a dangerous position. So by writing 12-tone music he could demonstrate that he wasn’t a communist, and — what an odd thing for 12-tone music to do! — demonstrate his loyalty.
And in fact the CIA supported American modernist art in this period — by, for instance, fostering appearances by American artists abroad — as an ideological weapon against communism.
One more thing. I also think I understand why composition students in the early 1970s, when I got my composition degree, wrote atonal music. Not for any of the reasons I’ve given above for work in earlier decades, though I’m sure some underlying sense that atonal music was important did play at least a small part. You need to think that what you’re doing matters.
But in the absence of any aesthetic joy or adventure — or at least none that I could sense, back then — there was one clear reason for students to write atonally. Atonality dominated the organized composing world, so by adopting it, you were going where the work was.
Which means — and I do love this comparison — that American composition students in the early 1970s may have written atonal music for the same reason that Mozart and his contemporaries wrote masses for the local archbishop. That, back then, was how you made a living. There wasn’t any market of that size for classical composition in the early ‘70s, but if you pleased the established powers, you could get college teaching jobs, and also grants and commissions. And make your living that way.
So an orthodoxy with deep aesthetic and cultural roots became simply the established way, to be followed for practical reasons. No wonder it exploded, blown away within a decade by minimalism and other new and more personal ways of writing music. Some of which did find an audience, and thus pointed classical music toward one key part of its future.
as a communist 12-tone composer I am now thoroughly confused. JK Great piece.
What a great piece! Thorough, informed, and breaking new ground. E..g, the point from Brett about fear of being “feminine” – serialism AND atonality being felt to be declarations of the Straight and Manly! There was one other obvious motivation for going 12-tone back then: the fear of being called uncool, irrelevant, and a ditz by critics and. by other composers. One wants the approval of the cool kids and the safety of not getting dissed/ picked on by them. (Besides, connoisseur snobbery has a big impact on musical taste, and not only in classical music.) So many instances of this come to mind (Boulez, Copland, Bernstein each in their way, for examples). BTW: as if on cue, Peter Philips: http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/music/9389052/why-church-music-is-back-in-vogue-and-squeaky-gate-music-has-had-its-day/
Fantastic piece!
You’re the first one I’ve ever encountered who addressed these questions. You explain things I’ve wondered about for years.
Thank you.
Very interesting – thanks, Greg!
I wish you didn’t feel the need to include those italicized disclaimers about 12-tone music in the middle of the post, but I totally understand why you did.
Do you have any thoughts as to why 12-tone music never took over in the same way on the West Coast?
I would say rather that some Westerners have projected their preference for the body onto non-Western cultures. And it’s not clear to me that rock & roll isn’t Western music.
This is excellent!: “Which means — and I do love this comparison — that American composition students in the early 1970s may have written atonal music for the same reason that Mozart and his contemporaries wrote masses for the local archbishop.”
Other thoughts, that may or may not be useful to anybody here:
1. You (Sandow) seem to be implying that serialism was a reaction to rock & roll, but serialism predated rock & roll, even in America (e.g. Copland’s piano quartet written in 1950). I suppose you can point to jump blues as a predecessor, both in sound and in crossing over racial lines, but of course that was never a mass phenomenon on anything close to the scale of Elvis.
2. On the other hand, the rise of serialism – or the decline of neo-classicalism – does coincide pretty closely with the abrupt decline in the popularity of swing in the late 1940s (and the failure of any other genre to replace swing as the clearly dominant form of popular music). Fracturing of the New Deal/World War II coalition?
3. Analogues in contemporary other art forms: The machismo of abstract expressionism. (Belated reaction to the sexual liberation of the 1920s, now that surviving the Depression and the war were no longer top priorities?) The attempt to reinvent the discipline from first principles, and refusal to make concessions to any popular notion of beauty, in brutalist architecture. (Hubris after a century of stunning scientific progress culminating in the atomic age, plus a reaction against the populisms of left and right?)
4. “…the CIA supported American modernist art in this period…” If we’re going to bring out that old excuse for disliking modernism, we may as well bring out the old rebuttal too: The CIA also sponsored performances of Samuel Barber, and jazz.
5. There’s modernism and then there’s modernism. Boulez and Elliott Carter don’t seem to have meant anything to the Beatles. But the music of Berio, the happenings organized by Cornelius Cardew, etc, and the influence thereof on the albums from Revolver onward is well known, and of course they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
Much of the electronic modernist classical music of the ’50s and ’60s isn’t very different in effect from some minimalist, post-minimalist, totalist, spectralist classical music, or from some of the electronic popular music of subsequent decades. So if some of the music by the serialists suggests a preference for the mind/soul/spirit over the body, some of it also suggests, maybe, that not all of them were entirely committed to one side or the other.
Argh. The above comment was supposed to begin by quoting this: “…rock & roll brought us white kids listening to previously segregated black music, and thus created an eruption of nonwestern culture in the heart of the west, carrying with it a revised relationship of mind and body. In western culture, mind and body are opposed, with mind considered superior, and the body thought dangerous.”
Sorry!
Oh God – #5 should have said “But the INTEREST OF THE BEATLES IN the electronic music of Berio (etc)… is well known.”
Kids, don’t post comments on the internet at five in the morning.
Graham, Re: your comments about Serialism/Rock-n-Roll/Big Bands, economist Larry DeBoer (in his “Is rock ‘n’ roll a symptom of baumol’s disease?” Journal of Cultural Economics. 9(2)) discusses the cost disease’s effect on the pop music industry. For example, he stated:
Economists Mary Connolly and Alan Krueger (in thier “Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music,” Working Papers 878, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section) discusses the shift to solo pop superstars also in the context of the cost disease:
Krueger’s recent remarks on income disparity in Rock/Pop music and how that relates to the declining Middle Class only emphasizes the point.
I’ve outlined how entertainment industries all suffer from the same problems as Classical Music in my blog and this older post focuses specifically on the Cost Disease in Pop music.
Thank you!
I am fascinated by the implications of pop music as we know it perhaps becoming unprofitable. A chance for more, let’s say, methodical composers to recapture the public’s ear?
The recent piece by Jack Conte of the Indie band Pomplamoose about their tour profits perfectly illustrate the cost disease effect–while their 24 show tour managed to sell about $100,000 and managed to take in $135,983, the total tour expense was $147,802 so they took that brought them a net loss of $11,819.
The piece breaks down all their expenses, and they knew they were likely going to lose money on the tour given they hired 6 extra players (at a cost of $50,000) to tour with them (they’re originally a duo).
Given we’re in a ‘Post-Pop’ age where the traditional Music Label Industry is just no as important for backing bands by financing recordings and giving tour support (mainly to use musical artists to sell the Label’s products–i.e. the album), this is something that’s a much more regular occurrence.
Indie Artist, John Green, said as much in his piece discussing how Warner Bros worked with his band, and how the label system inevitably creates an economic support system for the more successful acts (such as Radiohead, which he talks about in depth) which wouldn’t likely have been as successful without that support since non-affiliated artists usually have to operate as Pomplamoose does.
The vast majority of us who aren’t pop superstars and who regularly play the local and regional rock/pop circuits understand how little money can be made doing what we do and how few people are actually able to make a livable wage doing it at this level. The attrition rate of bands at this level is astronomical–most of the hundreds of local bands or artists I’ve shared bills with over the past couple decades are no longer active–but since we tend to focus on the superstar acts in these discussions, we get a skewed view of industry as a whole and now we’re seeing the cracks in Industry infrastructure which supports that superstar economy.
The income gap is just one symptom of that. Most of the other symptoms would read like a checklist of the Classical Music Crisis.
And, like you, Graham, I should have proofed before I hit “post”–John Green is an author who reposted the original piece by Mike Doughty. <a href="http://mkdo.co/post/26352263455/radiohead-wouldnt-exist-without-early-major-label"Here's the original post.
I think one of my points is that Pop music has always only been profitable for a few artist, but mostly profitable for the Industry which uses the artists to sell their product (the albums).
The answer is obvious: as with its parallel in modern architecture, 12-tone music became part of the language of the Cold War Eastern Establishment. The great music from that era, whatever the style — whether it be Copland’s “Inscape”, or Irving Fine’s “Notturno for Strings and Harp”, will survive, as long as classical music survives.
I think you’re mostly spot on, Greg. But I would describe the advent of rock somewhat differently. Whites had been digging (scholars would say “appropriating”) black music and dance for at least a couple of decades before rock & roll. Think of swing, jitterbug, the boogie woogie craze — you could go back through the “jazz age” of the 20’s and all the way to ragtime if you wanted. But yes, rock & roll was different — far less culturally and intellectually respectable than jazz and its offshoots (though rock & roll of course has led to very smart and culturally resonant music). There was no rock equivalent to Stravinsky’s “Ragtime,” Milhaud’s “La création” or even “Rhapsody in Blue.” You could not imagine a rock version of Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert in the 1950’s, or a rocker becoming a 12-tone composer, as jazz pianist Mel Powell did. Jazz was very much part of modernism — was there any music more avant-garde than early Louis Armstrong, or more advanced than Charlie Parker? — but rock was pure, unadulterated, *commercial* vernacular, aimed squarely at a pre-adult audience. Even jazz musicians hated it. So classical, as you put it, responded by moving away from the commercial vernacular and into its own decidedly non-commercial world, with its own secret, arcane language — in American Bandstand-speak, it had no beat and you couldn’t dance to it. I also think good comparisons could be made between 12-tone and the politics of the time, though I would express them differently. I’ll never forget when one of my college profs in the mid-70s stated without the slightest doubt that composers who did not follow the 12-tone path were irrelevant. How like the adherents of a certain hierarchical, anti-bourgeois, supposedly “progressive” and, fortunately, doomed political philosophy that only lives on domestically in the hothouse environment of the academy.
‘There was no rock equivalent to Stravinsky’s “Ragtime,” Milhaud’s “La création” or even “Rhapsody in Blue.” ‘
No? Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass”, Tristan Murail’s “Vampyr!”, Philip Glass’ “Low” and “Heroes” symphonies, Glenn Branca, Frank Zappa, the “Ecstasio” in Thomas Adès’ Asyla (actually, that’s informed by electronic dance music, a descendant of rock, among other things, which brings us to a general point…)
Rock certainly started as a commercial vernacular largely despised by the classical musicians (though there were vocal defenders from the beginning, for example Bernstein), but then so did jazz, and rock’s commercially viable period didn’t even last any longer. (Jazz: 1920s through 1960s, rock: 1950s through 1990s.)
‘Even jazz musicians hated it [rock]’ – Yeah, well even operetta composers hated jazz.
Granted, rock will probably never be QUITE as respectable as jazz – just as 19th century Italian opera will probably never be quite as respectable as French mélodie, for basically the same reason. (And neither of the latter will ever be as respectable as the German symphony, just as some people will never even deign to take jazz seriously.)
Perhaps I didn’t express myself well enough. I meant that rock & roll was different *at first* from jazz. As I said, it later “led to smart and culturally resonant music.” The work’s you cite are testament to that, though one of course does not have to justify rock’s importance by citing classical works it influenced. If you were to read my blog (johnmontanari.com), you would see that we don’t disagree on this.
So you’re saying rock took LONGER to become respectable (and smart and culturally resonant?) than did jazz?
Well, maybe.
It occurs to me that 1950s rock & roll perhaps shouldn’t be considered analogous to any kind of jazz, but closer to ragtime: Minimally ambitious genres, scandalous in their own time, that evolved into something more ambitious, though still of dubious cultural prestige.
The analog to 1960s pop/rock would then, of course, be 1920s jazz. And I submit that the prestige of rock in the ’60s wasn’t much less than that of jazz in the ’20s.
Very brave, very cogent and truthful, although the coupling of rock n’ roll with 12-tone music was ‘Perspectives of New Music’-funny!
I was at Boulanger’s piano at Fontainebleau, when the copy of Threni arrived from Stravinsky: we had to sightread sections of it (1958). Boulanger, at that moment, was non-committal, as I recall. Later that summer, I also went to Darmstadt: formidable.
I moved in another life direction after graduation from Goucher, into marriage (my father had died in my senior year) and motherhood: twins within ten months! When I emerged from those childbearing years, which included nursing a very sick little girl, I began to compose again in a fury. Donald Harris (Hartt School of Music, Ohio State) understood how to confront this.
But I always thought in patterns, in patterns which arranged themselves into structure, usually with the Golden Mean as my guiding light. I had taken with me, from those years of serialism, the responsibility to think before pen reached paper, to make pre-compositional decisions, to couple improvisation (at the Stravinskyian keyboard) with form and structure, every note of the music.
As Dean Harris continues to reiterate, “I write tonal music.” And so do I, even though those tonal centers move around as much as Gurrelieder does, before Schonberg resorted to the 12-tone row-d (couldn’t resist the pun).
Yours,
Elizabeth R. Austin
(my regards to Anne!)