Prelude

What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such—of what lies beyond the human and the made—and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all. (Wilde paraphrased in Sontag 13)

The word music had a much wider meaning to the Greeks than it has to us. In the teachings of Pythagoras and his followers, music was inseparable from numbers, which were thought to be the key to the entire spiritual and physical universe. So the system of musical sounds and rhythms, being ordered by numbers, exemplifi ed the harmony of the cosmos and corresponded to it. (Grout and Palisca 5)

For some Greek thinkers, music also had a close connection with astronomy. Indeed, Claudius Ptolemy (second century C.E.), the most systematic of the ancient music theorists, was also the leading astronomer of antiquity. Mathematical laws were thought to underlie the systems both of musical intervals and of the heavenly bodies, and certain modes and even certain notes were believed to correspond with particular planets, their distances from each other, and their movements. The idea was given poetic form by Plato in the myth of the “music of the spheres,” the unheard music produced by the revolutions of the planets; the notion was invoked by writers on music throughout the Middle Ages and later, including Shakespeare and Milton. (Grout and Palisca 5-6)

Music was a reflection of the harmoniousness of the universe. Subsequently, many centuries of western classical music were devoted to the exemplification of harmoniousness through layered, consonant pitches.

Some musical examples>

For centuries, western music was basically monophonic. But sometime between 700 and 900, the first steps were taken in a revolution that eventually transformed western music: monastery choirs began to add a second melodic line to Gregorian chant. (Kamien 62)

>

Many many masses later..

The Renaissance, 1450 – 1600: The Renaissance was of course a time of extraordinary artistic latitude, a time tolerant of nonconformity, able to expand to accommodate all sorts of styles and viewpoints, to endure the mediocre as well as to applaud the great, to be at once religious and pagan and classic. The world has enjoyed few such respites from rigidity of mind—perhaps a space of a few hundred years in Greece, a period in France from the Enlightenment almost to the present, Victorian England—but whenever they have occurred, a flowering has taken place—in the arts, in science, in literature, and most significantly, in life. (Shahn 78)

>

The Baroque, 1600 – 1750: Though the word baroque has at various times meant bizarre, flamboyant, and elaborately ornamented, modern historians use it simply to indicate a particular style in the arts. An oversimplified but useful characterization of baroque style is that it fi lls space—canvas, stone, or sound—with action and movement. Painters, sculptors, and architects became interested in forming a total illusion, like a stage setting. Artists such as Bernini, Rubens, and Rembrandt exploited their materials to expand the potential of color, detail, ornament, and depth; they wanted to create totally structured worlds. (Kamien 78)

It's also helpful to think of baroque style against the backdrop of seventeenth-century scientifi c discovery. The work of Galileo (1564-1642) and Newton (1642-1727) represented a new approach to science based on the union of mathematics and experiment; they discovered mathematical laws governing bodies in motion. Such scientifi c advances led to new inventions and the gradual improvement of medicine, mining, navigation, and industry during the baroque era. Baroque art is a complex mixture of rationalism, sensuality, materialism, and spirituality. (Kamien 78)

>

The Classical Period, 1750 – 1820: The eighteenth century was a cosmopolitan age. Partly because of marriages between powerful families, foreign-born rulers abounded—German kings in England, Sweden, and Poland; a Spanish king in Naples; a French duke in Tuscany; a German

Illustration 1: A Lady and Gentleman at the Virginals (1664), by Jan Vermeer

princess (Catherine the Great) as empress of Russia. Intellectuals and artists traveled freely.. German symphony composers were active in Paris, and Italian opera composers and singers worked in what are now Austria and Germany, in Spain, England, Russia, and France. (Grout and Palisca 422-423)

What people in the mid- and later eighteenth century wanted, according to its leading critics, might be described as follows: the language of music should be universal, that is, not limited by national boundaries; music hould be noble as well as entertaining; it should be expressive within the bounds of decorum; and it should be “natural”--free of needless technical complications and capable of immediately pleasing any sensitive listener. (Grout and Palisca 425)

>

The Romantic Period, 1820 – 1900: Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words. If music has one advantage over the other media through which a person can represent the impressions of the soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason. Reason, after all, is restricted in the diversity of its means and is capable only of confi rming or describing our affections, not of communicating them directly in their full intensity. To accomplish this even approximately, reason must search for images and comparisons. Music, on the other hand, presents at once the intensity and the expression of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended by our senses. It permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a mist, like a spirit, and fi lls our soul. (Franz Liszt qtd in Grout and Palisca 543)

Romanticism in music is not so much a collection of style traits as a state of mind that enabled composers to seek individual paths for expressing intense emotions, such as melancholy, yearning, or joy. Composers respected conventions of form and tonal relations up to a point, but their imagination drove them to trespass limits, which had once seemed reasonable, and to explore new realms of sound. (Grout and Palisca 543)

>

Illustration 2: Music Party, East Cowes Castle (c.1835), by X. J. M. W. Turner

The Contemporary Period, 1900 – Present: At the 19 th fin de siecle, Arnold Schoenberg insisted that, in a post-Wagnerian world, atonality was the next and logical step in western classical music's progression and development of harmony. In 1931, Schoenberg would boldly state: I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music which, being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition. (Burkholder 163)

>

Yet, the fact of the matter is that the 1912 premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, and later the 1923 debut of Schoenberg's new way of composing, was too far removed from the tenets of tradition to be both old and new. Schoenberg had invented a new way of organizing sound. As a result, and with the support of Berg and Webern and all the rest, no longer was western classical music interested in developing harmony as the Greeks had first conceived. It was now interested in developing cacophony.

An argument about serialism and its relatives

Atonality, Serialism, and Set Theory is music that cannot be heard—music that begs a new and different way of listening.

When Mahler saw the Five Pieces for Orchestra, he commented that he could not translate the notes on the page to sounds in his head. (Ross 53)

Let's get back to the Fourth Quartet and the relationship between the hexachords. When somebody says, “Can you hear these things?” the answer is that it's not a matter of hearing. Of course, you can hear these different notes. “Hearing” is one of those expressions that seems to represent a high degree of humanistic professionalism. But it's not a matter of hearing; it's a matter of the way you think it through conceptually with your musical mind. You can hear those six notes in example 1-8a. You hear where they are in register. You would certainly hear the contour difference if I played the hexachord in example -8b with the F# an octave higher than it is written. You'd hear everything. So it's not a matter of whether you hear it, it's a matter of how you conceptualize it, how you conceive it. (Milton Babbitt qtd in Dembski and Straus 23)

Atonality, Serialism, and Set Theory asked us to listen differently, to listen

Illustration 3: Schoenberg conducting a performance of Pierrot lunaire with soprano Erica Stiedry-Wagner at Town Hall, New York, on November 17. 1940, by Benedict Fred Dolbin

less to what is presented immediately before us and more to the process of intention.

In other words, what he's building into this piece (what he's, if you wish, burying under its surface , thought it's not very deeply buried) is a basis for transposition of his two hexachords. (Milton Babbitt qtd in Dembski & Straus 66; emphasis mine)

But I don't have to say more than once that twelve is not important, the effect of the twelve is... “That's not the way I conceive of a set. This is not a matter of finding the lost set. This is not a matter of cryptoanalysis (where's the hidden set?). What I'm interested in is the effect it might have, the way it might assert itself not necessarily explicitly.” Always throughout this piece, for example, it's there in a very decisive way. It's continuously, thoroughly, and utterly infl uential, but in constantly different ways and in constantly different degrees of explicitness and acting at various distances from the surface of the piece. Now the reason I say this is because it never occurred to me when I was writing this piece that anyone would ask this question. I regarded this as a very simple, direct piece. With Three Compositions and with this piece, though, I wasn't writing “for an audience”; I was still very much aware of the fact that I was writing a music that very few people, including professionals, had had experience with, aurally or in any other sense. So therefore it never occurred to me that the big issue would be what the set of the piece was. I had no idea that anyone would misconstrue the opening clarinet solo as being necessarily the set of the piece any more than one necessarily thinks that, because the first thing you hear in the First Symphony of Beethoven is an F-major triad, the piece is therefore to be construed as in F major. (Milton Babbitt qtd in Dembski & Straus 27)

It's perfectly reasonable for a reasonably competent listener to say, “Look, how in the devil can I take this in?” I'm not going to respond to that question because what we've been discussing is there in the fi rst measure, and you will certainly eventually hear it. .. I know it's very hard to hear these things, but you would be amazed (and I could demonstrate this if we had a few months) at the extent to which you will hear these things and hear associations even though you would imagine it impossible to identify the things as things in themselves. (Milton Babbitt qtd in Dembski & Straus 72)

Illustration 4: Arithmetic Composition (1930), by Theo van Doesburg

Atonality, Serialism, and Set Theory, is like observing Earth from space: So much movement, but so distant we cannot see it. Atonality, Serialism, and Set Theory asked us to listen differently, to listen less to what is presented immediately before us and more to the process of intention. Each grew from the belief that ever increasing inharmoniousness was the modern path. Their methods were logical ways of organizing cacophony. Organized cacophony? Though Babbitt would have you believe that, should one have the inclination, one can train oneself to hear these new movitic patterns, perhaps the idea of organized cacophony is oxymoronic,and even impossible.

OR, perhaps it is all a question of achieving an ever higher beauty of art..

The less “uplifting” beauty of face and body remains the most commonly visited site of the beautiful. But .. More to the point.. is the “higher” beauty of art. However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) beauty. (Sontag 4)

..that has led society to look so far inwards that only a great amount of effort would lead to its discovery.

A discussion on beauty

Art Skill and contrivance in adapting natural things to man's use (Hagen 221).

Artist One who professes and practices an art in which conception and execution are governed by imagination and taste (Hagen 221).

The best theory of beauty is its history. Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specifi c communities.

Communities dedicated by their leaders to stemming what is perceived as a noxious tide of innovative views have no interest in modifying the bulwark provided by the use of beauty as unexceptionable commendation and consolation. It is not surprising that John Paul II—and the preserve-and-conserve institution for which he speaks—feels as comfortable with beauty as with the idea of the good.

Illustration 5: Los Angeles Sunset (2005), by P-Kittye

It also seems inevitable that when, almost a century ago, the most prestigious communities concerned with the fi ne arts dedicated themselves to drastic projects of innovation, beauty would turn up on the front line of notions to be discredited. Beauty could not but appear a conservative standard to the makers and proclaimers of the new; Gertrude Stein said that to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead. Beautiful has come to mean “merely” beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment.

Elsewhere, beauty still reigns, irrepressible. (How could it not?) When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying, “Nobody of any real culture . . . ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned,” sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up to date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifi es to a decline in the belief that there is something called art. (Sontag 5-6)

Even when beauty was an unquestioned criterion of value in the arts, it was defined laterally, by evoking some other quality that was supposed to be the essence or sine qua non of something that was beautiful. A definition of the beautiful was more (or less) than a commendation of the beautiful. When, for example, Lessing equated beauty with harmony, he was offering another general idea of what is excellent or desirable.

In the absence of a definition in the strict sense, there was supposed to be an organ or capacity for registering beauty (that is, value) in the arts, called “taste,” and a canon of works discerned by people of taste, seekers after more rarefied gratifications, adepts of connoisseurship. For in the arts—unlike life—beauty was not assumed to be necessarily apparent, evident, obvious.

The problem with taste was that, however much it resulted in periods of large agreement within communities of art lovers, it issued from private, immediate, and revocable responses to art. And the consensus, however firm, was never more than local. To address this defect, Kant—a dedicated universalizer—proposed a distinctive faculty of “judgement” with discernible principles of a general and abiding kind; the tastes legislated by this faculty of judgement, if properly refl ected upon, should be the possession of all. But “judgement” did not have its intended effect of shoring up “taste” or making it, in a certain sense, more democratic. For one thing, taste-as-principled-judgement was hard to apply, since it had

Illustration 6: Lomo Flash (2009), by Photo David

the most tenuous connection with the actual works of art deemed incontestably great or beautiful, unlike the pliable, empirical criterion of taste. And taste is now a far weaker, more assailable notion than it was in the eighteenth century. Whose taste? Or, more insolently, who sez?

As the relativistic stance in cultural matters pressed harder on the old assessments, definitions of beauty—descriptions of its essence—became emptier. Beauty could no longer be something as positive as harmony. For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defi ned; beauty is precisely “the ineffable.”

The failure of beauty reflects the discrediting of prestige of judgment itself, as something that could conceivably be impartial or objective, not always self-serving or self-referring. It also refl ects the discrediting of binary discourses in the arts. Beauty defi nes itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can't say something is beautiful if you're not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called “political correctness,” but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.) The point is to find what is beautiful in what has not hitherto been regarded as beautiful (or: the beautiful in the ugly).

Similarly, there is more and more resistance to the idea of “good taste,” that is, to the dichotomy good taste/bad taste, except for occasions that allow one to celebrate the defeat of snobbery and the triumph of what was once condescended to as bad taste. Today, good taste seems even more retrograde an idea than beauty. Austere, diffi cult “modernist” art and literature have come to seem old-fashioned, a conspiracy of snobs. Innovation is relaxation now; today's E-Z Art gives the green light to all. In the cultural climate favoring the more user-friendly art of recent years, the beautiful seems, if not obvious, then pretentious. Beauty continues to take a battering in what are called, absurdly, our culture wars. (Sontag 6-8)

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and its appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with a social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude.

What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as—on the contrary—excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refi ned judgment, high standards,

Illustration 7: Still Life With Fish and Orange Slices (2008), Justine Reyes

fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical to oneself.

The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty—and the caring about beauty—was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was “interesting.”

Of course, when people said a work of art was interesting, this did not mean that they necessarily liked it—much less that they thought it was beautiful. It usually meant no more than they thought they ought to like it. Or that they liked it, sort of, even though it wasn't beautiful.

Or they might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where “the interesting” first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.” (Sontag 8-9)

Long use of “the interesting” as a criterion of value has, inevitably weakened its transgressive bite. What is left of the old insolence lies mainly in its disdain for the consequences of actions and of judgments. As for the truthfulness of the ascription—that does not even enter the story. One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness). The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring—understood as an absence, an emptiness—implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality. (Sontag 9-10)

Beauty can illustrate an ideal, a perfection. Or, because of its identification with women (more accurately, with Woman), it can trigger the usual ambivalence that stems from the age-old denigration of the feminine. Much of the discrediting of beauty needs to be understood as a result of the gender inflection. Misogyny, too, might underlie the urge to metaphorize beauty, thereby promoting it out of the realm of the “merely” feminine, the unserious, the specious. For if women are worshipped because they are beautiful, they are condescended to for their

Illustration 8: Audrey Hepburn (2010), by richpellegrino

preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful. Beauty is theatrical, it is for being looked at and admired; and the word is as likely to suggest the beauty industry (beauty magazines, beauty parlors, beauty products)--the theater of feminine frivolity—as the beauties of art and of nature. How else to explain the association of beauty—i.e., women—with mindlessness? To be concerned with one's own beauty is to risk the charge of narcissism and frivolity. Consider all the beauty synonyms, starting with the “lovely,” the merely “pretty,” which cry out for a virile transposition. (Sontag 10-11)

“Missing Measures” I: The identification of tonality with dated language and subject matterThis series of posts is drawn from readings of Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990).

We may begin with Schoenberg. Though anticipated by Ives and Valen (and perhaps others whose names escape me), Schoenberg became the generally accepted figurehead of the atonal movement, or the movement for the dissolution of traditional western harmony.

In Brahms the Progressive (1947), Schoenberg stated that the great shift from contrapunctility to homophony "was not a natural development; it was not evolution, but man-made revolution." Perhaps in so doing Schoenberg had hoped to validate his own man-made revolution of atonality. However, the comparison is not quite as fitting as Schoenberg would like. There is a key difference between Schoenberg's revolution and that of Keiser, Telemann, and Mattheson and that is that the trifecta of KTM continued to use the same fundamental vocabulary of past centuries, while Schoenberg invented a new language, a new vocabulary and new grammar of sound. Past revolutions revolted against structure; the modern one was to revolt against tonality (and then, eventually, everything else).

If a listener of western music had fallen asleep in 1750 and had awakened twenty-five years later to hear Mozart's Serenade No 5 in Salzburg or Haydn's Symphony No 60 in Eisenstadt he might well have been astonished by the music that he heard. The composers' ideas would have seemed most unusual. Yet, the listener, at least the educated one, would have recognized the tonal language. If he had wished, he could have traced in his mind its continuity all the way back to even the misty

Illustration 9: Napoleon at St. Bernard (1800), by Jacques-Louis David

beginnings of the Greek modes. However, if a listener had fallen asleep in 1900 and had awakened in 1930 to hear Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in Cologne it is likely he would have been very confused not only by the ideas of the music, but also by its strangely cacophonous language.

For by 1930 Schoenberg had codified his system of atonality in his lecture "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea"--later simply "Style and Idea"--thereby declaring the emancipation of dissonance and outlining a different language that would become a germ for the future of westernclassical music. Yet, greater than this dissolution of tonality, this liberation of dissonance, was the extremely unfortunate and appallingly unceremonious disposal of harmony. For, really, at the heart of all those centuries of tonal writing, of the hierarchical values and the codifi cation of major and minor scales were those gently kissing circles of modulation and tonicization, the tension and release of a system that had been the distinguishing point of western classical music. Melody was the filigree, the icing to the harmonic cake.

This was the singularity of the modern movement: It (rather self-righteously) broke with the fundamental building block of western music: Harmony.

However, it cannot be forgotten that Schoenberg's impulse for something sonically radical was an impulse shared by a number of his contemporaries. Suddenly the late romantic sounds of Mahler and Strauss were not enough. Suddenly they started to sound very wrong. Perhaps, like for the contemporaneous poets of vers libre, the prevailing language in western classical music had become grotesque, artifi cial, and pretentious. Perhaps tonality had become inexplicably associated with what was old, what was bad, what was wrong for modern times.

Missing Measures II: Tonality as a structural form

If the 19th century saw the elevation of music through the writings of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, the 20th saw the rise of science through the philosophies of Eliot, Zola, et al—people went from buying pianos to buying electronics and, as notions of musical supremacy were superceded by notions of technological and scientific supremacy, artists turned to modern experimental and scientific means in hopes to vivify their craft.

Illustration 10: Barbury Castle crop circle denoting Pi (2008)

* * *

In science, experimentalism leads to discoveries that lead to (what are supposed to be) advancements over older techniques. If this definition of experimentalism holds true for all applications, then, by extension, in music, experimentalism should lead to discoveries that lead to advancements over older musical techniques.

Indeed, musical experimentalism has led to an abundance of technical novelty made in the name of advancing music as a craft: serialism, total serialism, microtonality, chance, I-Ching and magic squares, alternative playing techniques, electronics, electro-acoustics, tape, the new complexity.. Yet, it is, perhaps, less than sound to think that music develops as surely as science can, and it is questionable whether or not any of these new musical techniques have made a signifi cant impact towards "changing music for the better." One could argue that it would be wasteful for a musician to do what has been done already, as it is wasteful for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries. However, unlike the continuity of development found in science, in art, there is a rich history of oscillation—periods of greater complexity are balanced with periods of greater simplicity. In music, we don't have quantifiable means of determining whether or not new procedures are producing good or bad results. We only have the test of time. Scientific works become dated; great music does not. Nevertheless, music chose to emulate the newly popular science, and adopted an idea of scientific experimentalism to achieve that end. Music became advanced and serious much in the same way that advanced, serious science is. Increasingly greater experimentation led to increasingly greater erudition of technique and, subsequently, increasingly greater inaccessibility. Thus, the newly experimental music came to posses great theoretical complexity, and its scientification can, perhaps, be considered complete.

But music deals with the qualitative issues of life. To the degree that scientifying music has divorced music from tonality and other traditional structural forms, scientifying music has also divorced music from perhaps its most scientific quality—a common language that can be rationally imparted to and shared among a community of interested musicians and

Illustration 11: Philips Pavilion (1958), by Le Corbusier

listeners. To the degree that scientifying music has dislocated it from comprehensible subject matter and has forced it into obscurantisms of one sort or another, scientifying music has divided music from its most vital and distinctive function—the simultaneously vivid and comprehensive examination of human experience. Tonality and regular forms had been the common building blocks for centuries of western musical history, and the definition of western music has always been Harmony. Abandoning these elements has led to an unfortunate interruption in the life of this massively rich history in music making. "There is still a lot of great music yet to be written in the key of C major."

Of course, the experimental trend has long since past. Its hey-day could be pegged at the 1950's, with its decline following in the footsteps of the so-called "mellowing" of so many of its fi rst practitioners. Experimentalism is not dead, but it has become lost in a sea that has since developed so many other approaches to art. So, where are we now?

Classical music today

>

The Atlantic Ocean, physically distancing the Americas from Europe, has served to culturally distance the nations as well. It has been a defi ning factor in the relationship between these two sides of the western world, resulting in differences present long before the purported current American-European divide in classical music, though a consciously cultivated American fork was not to appear until well into the 20 th century.

The divide that opened between Cage and Boulez indicated sociological differences between the avant-garde cultures of America and Europe. Cage's audience was essentially a bohemian one, including like-minded artists, Greenwich Village eccentrics, and outsiders of every description. Boulez's audience, on the other hand, overlapped with traditional circles of connoisseurship and art appreciation. (Ross 370)

I remember being shocked (I guess it was through the writings of Boulez that I first saw this attitude) that newness in the arts was supposed to be a kind of linear vector from the past, where you don't just search for the new or keep yourself open to possibilities—you've got to go in a straight line from what the past has done and make the next step. (Philip Corner qtd in Illustration 12: Death and the Woman (1915), by Egon Schiele

Smith and Smith 87-88)

Boulez said, 'It's historically necessary to write this way'. I felt, 'Well, just count me out of history then'. (Steve Reich qtd in Smith and Smith 214)

“Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don't want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we're really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie . . .” (Steve Reich qtd in Ross 475)

Whether pursuing simplicity or reacting to the complexity of serial music, a number of composers took up what is now known as minimalism. The term was apt, because their vocabulary, whether rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, or instrumental, was intentionally limited. The term as well as the direction may owe something to the New York group of visual artists who designed cyclic and repetitive structures consisting of simple elements such as lines and dots. The lengths, however, of many of these musical compositions or improvisations and the durations of particular gestures—in contrast to the compression and constant change of most serial music—were anything but minimal. (Grout and Palisca 777-778)

It was a purely American art, free of modernist angst and infl ected with pop optimism. (Ross 475)

>

As far as harmony is concerned, "minimalism" seems to have become equated with making very little go a very long way, as in pieces like Bright Blue Music (1985) or Ash (1989), which consist of nothing much other than alternation between tonic and dominant chords. (Bernard 119)

In 1978 Reich spelled out his new aesthetic in a terse essay titled “Music as a Gradual Process.” “I am interested in perceptible processes,” he wrote. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.”

This philosophy differs starkly from the thinking inherent in Illustration 13: Self Portrait (1999), by Chuck Close

Boulez's total serialism and Cage's I Ching pieces, where process works behind the scenes, like a spy network employing front organizations. (Ross 501)

But it is not so simple as a binary argument of U.S. versus Them. There are arguments amongst us, as there are arguments amongst them. Though the European Union and the euro unite it in politics and fi nance, Europe cannot be presumed united in culture as well.

Above all, composers from the Romance and Slavonic nations—France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and the countries of Eastern Europe—strained to cast off the German influence. For a hundred years or more, masters from Austria and Germany had been marching music into remote regions of harmony and form. Their progress ran parallel to Germany's gestation as a nation-state and its rise as a world power. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 sounded the alarm among other European nations that the new German empire intended to be more than a major player on the international stage—that it had designs of supremacy. So Debussy and Satie began to seek a way out of the hulking fortresses of Beethovenian symphonism and Wagnerian opera.

But the real break came with the First World War. Even before it was over, Satie and various young Parisians renounced fin-de-siécle solemnity and appropriated music-hall tunes, ragtime, and jazz; they also partook of the noisemaking spirit of Dada, which had enlivened Zurich during the war. Their earthiness was urban, not rural—frivolity with a militant edge. Later, in the twenties, Paris-centered composers, Stravinsky included, turned toward pre-Romantic forms; the past served as another kind of folklore. Whether the model was Transylvanian folk melody, hot jazz, or the arias of Pergolesi, Teutonism was the common enemy. Music became war carried on by other means. (Ross 77)

The United States encompasses cultural variances also. The intertwined history of the United States and Europe encourages some American composers to follow a more “European” path—with some leaning more “French” and others leaning more “German”--while some European composers are compelled to follow a more “American” path. In the state of New York, similar distinctions have been made between uptown and downtown sensibilities.

Such is the analysis set forward by the composer Kyle Gann in some Illustration 14: Jackson Pollack

trenchant commentaries on late-twentieth-century music. Gann lumps both “modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category, named for the Upper West Side of New York City, home of Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, and other richly endowed institutions. Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch's words, look for “a way outside”--anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic. They descend from the free spirits who had long gone their own way on the West Coast. In New York such composers have tended to congregate in loft spaces, art galleries, and rock clubs below Fourteenth Street. (Ross 490)

Uptown: European :: Downtown : American

But it is not so simple as a binary argument of U.S. versus Them.

Minimalism is the story not so much of a single sound as of a chain of connections. Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone row, Webern found a secret stillness in its patterns; Cage and Feldman abandoned the row and accentuated the stillness; Young slowed down the row and rendered it hypnotic; Riley pulled the long tones toward tonality; Reich systematized the process and gave it depth of field; Glass gave it motorized momentum. The chain didn't stop there. Starting in the late sixties, a small legion of popular artists, headed by the Velvet Underground, carried the minimalist idea toward the mainstream. As Reich later said, there was a “poetic justice” in this flipping of roles: just as he had once been transfixed by Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke, pop personalities in New York and London gawked at him in turn. (Ross 508)

Twelve-tone --> Chance --> Minimalism --> Cross-over.

Regardless of how the stylistic map is drawn, differing branches of thought and the development of forks of western classical composition are evident. Though to varying degrees, many movements of classical composition are presently and simultaneously being practiced—not only twelve-tone, chance, minimalism, and cross-over, but also mixed media, reinterpretations and remixes, east-west collaborations, music for fi lm, and those who are trying to reconnect with harmoniousness through new instruments and non-standard tuning systems, to name a few. Some are writing non-commercially, others are writing commercially, and a magnificent few manage somehow to do both at once. Most of the stuff

Illustration 15: Le Neveu de Raineau (1874), by Frank Stella

you hear in the concert hall will be the oldie goodies, but in some spaces only the most experimental and boundary pushing works are programmed. This complicated landscape of contemporary classical music is a refl ection of the convolutions of contemporary society.

That “anxiety of influence” thing

Do you think you'll make sense in 200 years' time? I don't think I make any sense now. Besides, I can't think about

that. You get stuck in the masterpiece syndrome, where each piece becomes something more than just the piece you're writing. (Robert Moran qtd in Smith and Smith 200)

It is safe to say that twentieth-century composers are not the fi rst to have been conscious of tradition—that ineluctable circumstance whereby, as Schoenberg once remarked, 'no new technique in the arts is created that has not had its roots in the past.' There is nevertheless considerable agreement that tradition has provided greater challenge, and more onerous burden, for twentieth-century composers than it did for their predecessors, and something of this special, twentieth century sensibility seems to lie behind statements like this recent one from Alexander Goehr: 'composers find their subject-matter in the contemplation of other works of music, from whatever point of view, because such works of music contain within them all the preoccupations of past and greater composers, their hopes, dreams, successes and failures as well as, presumably, the indefinable subject-matter of music itself.' Goehr offers there the prospect of an inescapable inheritance about which new composers can scarcely have anything other than very mixed feelings. I would not use this evident truth to support the argument that contemplation of 'past and greater composers' inevitably produces that sorry state often known as 'the anxietyof influence'. Nevertheless, awareness of tradition can make life more complex for composers, and it can also leave commentators on composition in some difficulty, as they search constantly for the appropriate context in which to place the various sounds which are the primary concern of their thinking and writing. (Whittall 11)

In an age where programming of the old masters far outnumbers programming of the up-and-comers, composers today, unlike at any time before, are forced into contention with works that have stood the test of time. (!!) How does one write music when one's work is measured against

Illustration 16: Ludwig van Beethoven (1823), by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

centuries of only the best examples? Is it small wonder that contemporary composers should suffer a bit of anxiety over this infl uence?

Commercialism

Germane to the anxiety of influence is the observation that commercialism makes for bad art.

One of the very recherche bases of evaluation but still one that dominates both the world of criticism and that of creative art is an inversion of the common standard of popularity. The reasoning goes something like this: public taste has often failed to understand very great art, has indeed violently rejected it. This very art, however, so often has been richly vindicated by time and subsequent tastes. Logically, then, it seems to follow that if a piece of work is truly great it will necessarily be rejected by the public. Here the inversion begins to emerge, for the belief has thus become universal among refined people that if a work of art is thoroughly incomprehensible to the public it must automatically be good. And out of that non-Aristotelian reasoning comes the following principle widely proclaimed by artists and by critics: the work of art must not appeal to the public, or be understood by it. “I hope,” says one artist, “that I will never win public approval, for if I do I will know that my work is bad.” (Shahn 105)

When one is measured against The Greats, one is compelled to attempt greatness and write great music. And one has a good chance of gaining admittance to the highly exclusive club of Great if in one's lifetime one's work is hated by the public. It is a true observation in so far that some of the great artists of the past two centuries were hated in their lifetimes—a trend that is, perhaps, linked to modernity's search for the beautiful in the ugly. But, in earlier centuries, when music was made-to-order, there was no such association between commercial work and poorness of quality; there is a difference between music that is written specifi cally to elicit a negative public response, and music that is drawn from inspiration and poorly received. The Impressionists all wanted to exhibit at the Paris Salon, they all wanted to reach people, because part of the point of art, beyond being a personal expression or expression of beauty, is to communicate, connect, affect.

Global awareness

Illustration 17: Beethoven Suite of 4 (1987), by Andy Warhol

You once said that you view all your work as inherently theatrical. Is theatre a necessary element for all your music?

I think it is now. In our situation, in the way music exists in America and probably all over the media world now, there is no 'given' language, a language you can use without feeling self-conscious. There are too many styles and too many complicated ideas that the composer has to acknowledge, if only to himself. You can't tell a story without thinking of how you are doing it. Everybody is totally conscious of technique. When you are in that situation as a composer, you automatically associate every musical thought with a reason, and that reason makes the music theatrical. You can't help it. You can imagine a naïve approach to music in a culture where there is a uniform musical language. This is probably a fiction in itself, but if for instance you live in a small town and you don't know that there is anything outside of that town, your work only has to do with where you are in the town, and where you are has a specific meaning. But today it doesn't matter much where you are in the town. You think of your work in terms of the whole world. You think, 'I'm going down to the grocery store in this little town on the sea-coast in England, and somewhere there is London and somewhere there is Paris and somewhere there is Beirut, where they are killing people right this minute.' So you're self-conscious. You are constructing your voyage to the grocery store in the context of South Africa, Israel, Russia.

So you go to the deli in global terms? You go to the deli in a very complicated way, because you've got

all this stuff going on. And that's the way you write music. You can't do it any other way. You start to work and you think, 'They're killing people in Israel. What am I doing?' (Smith and Smith 48-49)

Because there are, incontestably, zones of experiences that are not distressing, that give joy, it becomes, perennially, a puzzle that there is so much misery and wickedness [ in the world]. A great deal of narrative, and the speculation that tries to free itself from narrative and become purely abstract, inquires: Why does evil exist? Why do people betray and kill each other? Why do the innocent suffer?

But perhaps the problem ought to be rephrased: Why is evil not everywhere? More precisely, why is it somewhere—but not everywhere? And what are we to do when it doesn't befall us? When the pain that is endured is the pain of others?

Hearing the shattering news of the great earthquake that leveled Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and (if historians are to be believed) took

Illustration 18: US World Studies II (2005), by Jules de Balincourt

with it a whole society's optimism (but obviously, I don't believe that any society has only one basic attitude), the great Voltaire was struck by the inability to take in what happened elsewhere. “Lisbon lies in ruins,” Voltaire wrote, “and here in Paris we dance.”

One might suppose that in the twentieth century, in the age of genocide, people would not find it either paradoxical or surprising that one can be so indifferent to what is happening simultaneously, elsewhere. Is it not part of the fundamental structure of experience that “now” refers to both “here” and “there”? And yet, I venture to assert, we are just as capable of being surprised—and frustrated by the inadequacy of ourresponse—by the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates as was Voltaire two and a half centuries ago. Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events—by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That here we are here, now prosperous and safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening . . . while elsewhere in the world, right now . . . in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio . . . (Sontag 227-228)

Global consciousness has led us to question established regional and cultural specific values. It is related to the modern demolition or reinterpretation of art, beauty, and taste, and has effected the way the we tell stories, musically or otherwise. The choice to use one thing over another starts to feel like a much more magnanimous decision. To use traditional western instrumentation is dated. To use non-western instruments is cultural expropriation. To use serial techniques is elitism. To use tonality is pandering. To write music at all is a silly waste of time.. or, is it a social responsibility?

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world. (Sontag 226)

Modernity's massively increased accessibility of information has heightened social awareness to a chafing degree. What do you do when everything is so opened up? How do you reconcile history? How do you reconcile the world, and even the universe? What's my motivation?Illustration 19: Financial Times Wednesday 12 November 2008, by Kennard Phillips

_____ Music

“Wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it actually was) is the famous characterization of the goal of historical understanding propounded by the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold Ranke. (Webster 110)

Unlike the truth according to Schoenberg-Boulez, the truth according to truth is that art and, indeed, life does not operate in a continuously linear progression. It operates in cycles, periods. Things get [one way], and then they get [an opposite way], with each side of the spectrum reacting to the extremes of the other. Western classical music could not continue the path of serialism indefinitely, for eventually and naturally reactionary movements would spawn. We find ourselves at a time where so many reactions and reactions of reactions are piling one on the other, not one having the social consensus to overtake the western and increasingly global cultural landscape.

Though contemporary western classical music lacks stylistic consensus, it does not go to say that we must lack consensus in vocabulary as well. However, in order to tackle this concern, one must fi rst come to terms with the idea of the usefulness of terminology itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: ... You've said a number of times over the years that we're forced to use the expression “classical music” to describe the music that we're creating now, which really doesn't fi t and really kind of hurts our purpose in a way because it's an inaccurate term.MILTON BABBITT: You know why. I don't have to tell you, I don't have to tell anyone why it's an inaccurate term; it's an historical term. It describes a certain chronological period at the end of the eighteenth century and so it defines something. Well, after that it becomes normative; it becomes a kind of music; it becomes qualitative, quantitative, and it's misleading. I rather like Wiley Hitchcock's term. It sounds elitist, so I won't offer it to you yet. I'll tell you my anecdote about this. Many, many years ago at the Smithsonian in September, there was a huge, huge, huge congregation on the subject of American music. We were there for three or four days (I've forgotten now) and the Smithsonian decided to recognize every kind of music. There was ethnic music; there was non-ethnic music; there was music from every little corner of every little forest in North Dakota and I'm not exaggerating. Little groups who had their own kind of music, which they invented on their own kinds of instruments were all there. And

322 Name: Mr. No Name Date: 04/05/09 17:28

　ﾟ　,　　　,　。　.　　　＋　　ﾟ　　　。　　。ﾟ　.　ﾟ。,　☆　*　。ﾟ. 　 o.ﾟ　　。　. 　。。　.　　．。　　　　o　　　．. 　。　ﾟ　 ﾟ　,　。.　o　。*　。　.　o．　。　．　. 　　　　　　　　。　　　.　　　。　　．　.ﾟ o　。　*．　。　．.　☆　.　＋.　.　　. 　。　.　　．　.　　　.　　　．　　。　ﾟ。,　☆　ﾟ.　＋　。　ﾟ　,。　.　。　　,　. 。　　　　ﾟ　　。　　　ﾟ　　.　　+。　ﾟ　*　。.　,　。ﾟ　+.　。*。　ﾟ.　　　.　.　．　　. 　。　　.　　　.　。　。ﾟ.　。*　。,　´。.　　☆。。.　ﾟ。+　。　.。　　.　　｡　　　. 　　.　　　。　　ﾟ　ﾟ。　。,　.。o　☆　+　,ﾟ。　*。.　。　。　.　　　　。　　　　. 　ﾟ　.ﾟ　ﾟ　　。ﾟ　+　。.　+。　*　。ﾟ。ﾟ.,　,+　。ﾟ.　。　.　.　　　,　　　　,　　　. ﾟ。ﾟ+ﾟ`,　o。。.ﾟ*。ﾟ　。.ﾟ　。　☆＋。。ﾟ.　°　。　.　　　, 　　　　　　ﾟ　　　　ﾟ　。,　.ﾟ。　+　☆。,ﾟ.　o 。。+　。ﾟ.,　　.　ﾟ　　　,　　　。　　　　　。　　　.　　　. 　ﾟ.　ｏ　*　。ﾟ。ﾟ.。ﾟ。+ ﾟ　。　。　ﾟ。 ﾟ　。　　ﾟﾟ`　.ﾟ　.ﾟ.　ﾟ.　.　ﾟ　　.　　ﾟ　　.　　　,　　.　　　　　.　　.　　　。　　　　　　ﾟ　.

　　　　　　　　 ,-､　　　　　　　　　　　　,.- ､ 　　　　　　　 ./::::: ＼　　　　　　　　　／:::::: ヽ

　　　　　　　/::::::::::::;ゝ--──-- ､._/::::::::::::::| 　　　　　　 /,.- ''"´ ‐ 　　　　　　　　＼:::::::::::|

　　　　　／　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　ヽ､::::| 　　　　/ ● 　　　　 　　　　　　　　　　ヽ|

　　　 l　　　, , , ● 　　　　　　　 　　　　 l 　　　 .| 　　　　　　　(_人__丿　　　　　､､､　　|

　　　l 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 l 　　　　` ､　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 / 　　　　　　` ｰ ､__ 　　　　　　　　　　　　／　　　　　　　　　/`''' ── ┬ｰ -- --- '''""´

　　　　　　　　　Thanks Train.　　　　　　　　　Thank you so, so much...

[via project.DENSHA]

something they called classical music was assigned to a tiny corner. The three people involved were a historian, a music critic, and I was the composer. And then there were people in the audience and Wiley Hitchcock was one of those, I tell you, I mentioned him for a reason. So we were there, talking and immediately the historian, who was Richard Crawford from Michigan, said "Look, I can't stand this being classical, we have to do something with the word. It just offends me as an historian." I said, "Fine. It offends me for other reasons. What are we going to use?" So then the discussion began—you can imagine what the discussion consisted of. It consisted of, fi rst of all, the assumption that we were calling ourselves serious musicians. But then other musicians would say, "We're just as serious as you are." And of course, I don't take a composer seriously just this, so we can't call it serious. And then there were people that would call it concert music, which is what the Performance Rights Societies were calling it and then saying, "Well, we can't call it a concert because every little rock group now gives concerts and they get 50,000 people and we're lucky to get 50. So who are we to use the term concert?" So it went on like that quite literally and tiresomely for a long time, then finally one of Hitchcock's terms, I said, "I don't mind one of Hitchcock's terms, which is cultivated music." Well, you can imagine what that induced: the scream of elitism and we just gave up. (“Milton Babbitt: A Discussion in Twelve Parts”)

People now think that labels are really dangerous, because the minute you slap one on to something it confines the definition of what you're trying to do. Composers get really angry saying, 'Oh, but I'm not just doing that, I'm doing all of this too'. But when you think about it, labels have been very useful. If you talk about Impressionist painting, you're not confi ning Monet, you know that he does other things too, his work transcends that. We use labels because they're useful. So why not use 'minimalism'? Why do even the hallmark minimalist composers like Steve Reich say, 'My music isn't minimalist'. I mean, come on! It's minimal. So what? That's kind of a nice thing. That's addressing the idea of labels. Obviously the music is going to transcend it, as it should. Whether I belong in any tangential way to post-minimalism is I suppose more up to other people to decide. But it's dangerous for me to start thinking in terms of labels. You do things, then other people sort out what it all means. (Michael Torke qtd in Smith & Smith 246-237)

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are

arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be fi lled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. (Sontag 145)

The term “classical music” can have different meanings depending on the context of its use. It can mean a very specific period of western music, consisting of the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven years, and it can mean western art music generally.

Shall we stop calling it Baroque because, during its time, the term was considered by many to be derogatory, as some would insist that we stop calling it Impressionistic simply because those labeled Impressionistic cared not for the association?

It would seem that questioning terminology is a rather excessive and moot pursuit. Words have cycles and lives of their own. They come into meanings and those meanings can change over time. But the importance of a contemporaneous consensus on vocabulary should not be ignored, for without an agreed upon vocabulary communication cannot be completed and history, a medium of words, cannot be recorded.

>

What's wrong with calling it Classical? Or, perhaps the more pertinent question is: Can we call it Classical anymore? Should we.. let the term die? Does Classical music mean western art music from its inception to its present state? Or did Classical music end with the end of the 19 th

century..?

Classical music (as a genre and by definition) has changed so dramatically that perhaps it is no longer viable to consider those who continue under the aegis of “classical music” as creating what people would think of as classical music. For many, classical music has come to be associated with historical work.

Illustration 20: I think I just fell in love with you (2009), by Coulson Macleod

>

Classical contemporary? Impossible! Perhaps the conclusions of the classical delegation for the Smithsonian congregation were not so absurd. Perhaps calling it “classical” offends everybody.

New and improved

The [20th] century began with the mystique of revolution, with the mind-bending harmonies and earthshaking rhythms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The process of politicization was already under way in the twenties, as composers competed to stay ahead of changing trends and accused one another of complicity in regressive tendencies. In the thirties and forties, the entire Romantic tradition was effectively annexed by the totalitarian state. But nothing could compare to what happened when the Second World War ended and the Cold War began. Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone composition gave way to “total serialism,” which gave way to chance music, which gave way to a music of free-floating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada happenings and collages, and so on. All the informational clutter of late-capitalist society, from purest noise to purest silence, from combinatorial set theory to bebop jazz, came rushing in, as if no barrier remained between art and reality. (Ross 355-356)

In Italy, where the Futurists were promoting an art of speed, struggle, aggression, and destruction, Luigi Russolo issued a manifesto for a “MUSIC OF NOISE” and began to construct noise-instruments with which to produce the roaring, whistling, whispering, screeching, banging, and groaning sounds that he had predicted in his pamphlet. In the United States, Charles Ives, a young New England composer under the infl uence of Transcendentalism, began writing music in several keys at once or none at all. And Busoni, in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music of 1907, theorized all manner of extra-tonal experiments, and realized a few of them in his own works.

The teleological historian might describe all this activity as the collective movement of a vanguard, one that was bent on sweeping aside the established order. Yet each of these composers was following his or her own course (to take Scriabin's projected gender ambiguity into

Illustration 21: Bull V (1973), by Roy Lichtenstein

account), and in each case the destination was unique. Out of all of them, only Schoenberg really adopted atonality. What set him apart was that he not only introduced new chords but eliminated, for the time being, the old ones. “You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old,” Busoni observed.. (Ross 58)

I forget just what woman it was who, somewhere near the turn of the century, said “better to be dead than to be out of style.” Whoever it was certainly touched the keynote of the twentieth century, for the ideal of “the latest” is with us in force today. It is hardly necessary to point out the loss of status that goes with the outdated automobile, or the belief in the betterness of the newest model of television set, refrigerator, or other piece of equipment. Whether or not the new model is improved it must show a marked lateness of design in order to be desireable to the public. (Shahn 100)

The industrial revolution brought with it a cult of consumerism. The attitude, “why fix when you can buy new?” took hold of society, with advertisements boasting of “new and improved” products over the old stuff. Heck, why bother to wait for the old stuff to break? This new stuff is so fantastic, and fantastically affordable to boot. People became preoccupied, consumed, infatuated with the idea: the superiority of newness.

And how about the pure objectivity of science? Does it not also show a slight tropism toward the new? The latest medical discovery seems to possess a certain potency that is absent from the discoveries of 1883 or 1912. The new ideas of physics breathe excitement; today the universe is found to be twice as old; tomorrow it expands to four times in size; today the principle of parity is abolished; tomorrow it is re-admitted in a different framework. It is acknowledged that we, the public, cannot really know the meaning of these crashing reversals, but we are invited to share in their excitement. (Shahn 101)

Well, on the vaguest possible level, it's trying to make some kind of music that I've never heard before, or indeed that anyone's ever heard before. This is where it gets messy, because you start to get into psychological things. It may not be physically possible for us to hear this kind of music, because we have to filter everything back through what we've heard in the past... You have to try and write music that leaves a lot of room for

Illustration 22: I Will Not Make Boring Art (1972), by John Baldessari

something new to happen which you haven't written. (Glenn Branca qtd in Smith and Smith 55)

The American composer, Henry Cowell was a signifi cant figure in the development of the cult of the new in contemporary classical music. In an article on “Who is the greatest living composer?”, published in the Northwest Musical Herald in 1933, he wrote: Very fine music may seem at first to be ugly, unclear, formless, etc. only because its medium is not familiar. Music which has no lasting worth may please greatly because every melodic fragment and harmony it uses, as well as what it expresses, is already familiar through other work. In other words: The familiar is disposable. Only the unfamiliar, or new, has the potential for lasting worth.

In addition to the article above, and many others like it, Cowell also published a number of books, including a theoretical treatise titled New Musical Resources (1930). He organized the New Music Society for the performance of new music; the New Music Editions, which published scores of new music; and the New Music Recordings. Through these ventures Cowell launched the work of many of his contemporaries, including Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, Edgard Varese, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. It is uncertain where this term “new music” originated, but Cowell was certainly a proponent in its propagation.

I don't mind the term “new music”. It attests to the period obsession with the new, so much so that some have tried to be even newer than new—the avant of the avant-garde. Today, the American Music Center calls its online magazine, The New Music Box. College classical contemporary ensembles are often1 dubbed the New Music Ensemble. I often refer to classical contemporary music as “new music”, though I haven't done so for much of these notes. I certainly think of it as “new music”. Therefore, Can we call it classical music anymore? How about classical contemporary? Perhaps not. Schoenberg may have been a conceited puppy, but the break away from harmonic tradition and the movement that transpired after was significant.2

1 But not always, and many music departments don't have any semblance of a new music ensemble at all. A quick survey of the top 20 colleges on the U.S. News and Report shows that only 3 of them have a New Music Ensemble. One of these has both a New Music Ensemble and a Contemporary Ensemble. One has (just) a Contemporary Ensemble. Some have Laptop Orchestras or ensembles of a similar nature by a different name. But most have no form of new music ensemble at all. Worth doing a survey I think.

2 Ultimately it doesn't matter what you think. What matters is what others think. Because when you Illustration 23: And if I don't meet you no more in this world.. (2006), by Cerwith Wyn Evans

Berg and Webern changed history..

Can it be denied that we have since embarked on a new age of a truly new music? No longer expected to write for someone or something else, in an age where classical composers are encouraged to write for themselves, has not the newly composed music of the old classical tradition become so highly idiosyncratic as to destroy what has long been established as the vocabulary of classical discussion? Do keys matter when equal temperament has made every key sound the same? Do sets matter when nobody can hear them? It's so new that we need new words to talk about it. We've tried the old ones—even “classical” doesn't seem to fi t anymore.

As the behemoth of mass culture breaks up into a melee of subcultures and niche markets, as the Internet weakens the media's stranglehold on cultural distribution, there is reason to think that classical music, and with it new music, can fi nd fresh audiences in far-flung places. (Ross 515)

New Music is..

Western classical music has always been tied to the patronage 3 system: from patronage by the church, to patronage by the aristocracy, to patronage by the university (and/or state). In the Middle Ages, the church commissioned composers to write music in exaltation of God. The voice was considered the most appropriate vehicle for sacred musical worship, and thus vocal music, singable or song-like music, predominated. In the Classical Period, the church's hold on society waned. The aristocracy took its place, commissioning composers to write music for their social functions and day-to-day life. Music was still singable/song-like, but the instrumental repertory had expanded. In the twentieth century, the aristocracy's hold on society waned, and the university became the next haven for composers to write essentially whatever they wished. Up until this (past) century, music history texts would discuss music with respect to its forms: mass, opera, sonata—patterns of composition adopted by most composers. Up until this point, art was meant to serve something outside of the artist. This is true of the arts in general, as many early examples of art have unattributed authors—the inclusion and signifi cance of the artist's signature was a much later development. With the Classical Period, the emergence of the big three, and with Beethoven especially, one fi nds the development of the idea of the great artist and great art. Art and music became more about the ones who created it. Music history texts would discuss individual composers, with very little if any type space devoted to the discussion of shared compositional patterns. But there are still things in common. There is 12-tone/serial/chance, there is minimalism, there is electronic, and various hybrid forms. Music has become more rhythmically varied, more non-vocal or more percussive, has embraced the less singable or song-like..

What's that you say? That I'm over-simplifying? That I've got it completely wrong? It's possible. But I'm not saying that this explanation that makes sense to me is going to make sense to everyone. I'm not saying that I'm Right and you're Wrong. I'm just saying.

are gone, it is others who live on. Schoenberg would not have had the impact that he had if not for his followers. He could have been unequivocally dismissed, but instead he was deified. Of course, if others care what you think, then what you think lives on. But it is the others that give you that significance.

<3 Patron versus Consumer

“Patron” and “consumer” mean basically the same thing—in fact, they are synonyms—but I want to draw a distinction for the purposes of my discussion, so that I don't have to provide a string of words defining my exact meaning every time I refer to the one over the other. Instead I will use just one word whose meaning I hope you will agree with.

Patronage: support by a monied class (The Rich). from M.L. patronus “patron saint, bestower of a benefice, lord, master, model, pattern” .. Meaning “one who advances the cause” (of an artist, institution, etc.), usually by the person's wealth and power..

Consumerist: support by the general public (generally The Folk, but can also include The Rich) In economic sense, “one who uses up goods or articles” (opposite of producer)

Illustration 24: And if I don't meet you no more in this world.. (2006), by Cerwith Wyn Evans

>4

(music-)historical periods are constructions, indeed retrospective reconstructions, which we interpret as conceptually coherent even though they will scarcely have seemed so in their own time. (Webster 110)

By and large, Zeitgeist thinking in its cruder forms is now rejected by comparative historians in favor of what Eugene K. Wolf has engagingly called "contrapuntal" history; one might also suggest "multivalent," owing to the analogy with a leading current paradigm of musical analysis. The thesis is simply that events in different domains do not necessarily run parallel: they may differ in character or "value" at a given place and time; they may develop differentially, regarding both the dates of their beginning, middle, and end stages and their rates of development; and these differences apply both within a given region and across different ones. The “watersheds” between periods can occur at different times, whether in different domains in the same geographical area (the Renaissance in music both began and ended later than in the visual arts and literature—and this is not a problem, but an opportunity), or in a single domain in different areas (the musical Baroque persisted longer in Protestant Germany and the Hapsburg lands than in France or Italy). Of course, one can argue that even a single domain in a single area—say, music in Vienna 1780-1815—was subject to heterogenous or even opposing forces and values, such that to define it as "the x period" privileges certain characteristics or criteria and thereby understates its complexity or perpetuates a covert agenda. On the other hand, in this context the celebration of multifariousness eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns: even if the understanding of historical phenomena that periods offer is always partial and self-interested, the only alternative is—no understanding at all. (Webster 113-114)

As I understand it, classical music, or the music of the patronage system, has not died yet. Maybe it will die someday. Maybe financial wealth will sink into the tar pits of extinction and the whole notion of patronage will become some quaint practice read about in the history books. I don't pretend to know. If we don't reverse climate change and we do in fact die

4 It is the money that makes it sophisticated. When you have money, you can have nicer things. You can have linens, and marble, and finely tuned watches, and the same is true for the music. You can have music of a refined craftsmanship. This is not to disparage non-classical music. One accounts for the quality of a music from within its existing conditions. There is a lot of very good non-classical music. You can enjoy non-classical music and not be accused of baseness or stupidity.

Illustration 25: Cardinal (2010), by Susie Ghahremani

within the coming generations, then perhaps it will die with us but not before us. But it does seem to be as Ross put it.

<

Like the Renaissance, the New is a wild flurry of greatly variegated activities; like the Baroque, the New is highly infl uenced by the sciences (this like is further evidenced by Schoenberg's inclination towards Baroqueian development techniques); like the Classical, the New exists in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan society; like the Romantic, the New is a champion of idiosyncrasy and the individual.

The New rhymes with the past, but the New is new.

It is not a re-birth of anything in particular, but the gestation of an uncertain future. The sciences that it grapples with are of a highly advanced, near incomprehensible technology. Its cosmopolitan internationalism is far wider in reach than the european borders. It is perhaps more like the Romantic, but without the romance.

New Music is about coming to terms with global and historical awareness, coming to terms with the discrimination of beauty and taste. It is the aftermath of harmonic destruction and the destruction of classical forms. It is about what happens when every question is loosed on the world, and it is about how you respond to these questions. A large population of composers ran down to the path set out by Schoenberg, but some went in other directions. Bartok went modal and folk, a tendency found today in Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and in works like Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion. Debussy and Messiaen went ambient, a tendency shared by Grisey and the French spectralists. Many composers did a little of everything: Ligeti wrote Etudes pour piano, Musica Ricercata, and Lux aeterna.

So where do we go from here. Who knows. But it's not over yet. It simply refuses to die. Instead, consuming all of the madness surrounding it, becoming an incredibly misshapen, nondescript blob, it remains, or, perhaps because of this, becomes even more resistant, immune to destruction.

This is the end of the world as we know it. But it isn't the end of the world. (Anderson 35)

,g 8b ,g ,g 8g 8g o8888" 88 Y8 .od888888888P" 88' 88' 88 88 " 88 88 88 88' 88888888b 8888888888888888 d88888888888888b 888 88 oo 88 88 88 88 88 88 8'88 8' 88 P' 88,o 88 o9, 888888888888 88 8 88 88P 88,8P 88 88 o8 88 g ,888 888' 88888888b 88 8' 88 `8, d8'88 g88 88 gg ,88' 88 ,P 88 8b 8' 88 oP 88, d8' `g88' 88 8 88 `P 88 `88 g o8' gg88b, 88 f 88 d8' `b' o8 oP' "Y8ao 88 d8'

Works CitedAnderson, Kurt. “Essay: The Reset.” Time 173/13 (April 6, 2009): 32-38.Babbitt, Milton. “Milton Babbitt: A Discussion in Twelve Parts.” New Music Box December 1,

2001 <http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbxid=32fp01>.Bernard, Jonathan W. “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent

American Music,” American Music 21.1 (Spring 2003): 112-133.Bithell, Caroline. “On the Playing Fields of the World (and Corsica): Politics, Power, Passion,

and Polyphony.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12.1 (2003): 67-95.Burkholder, J. Peter. “Schoenberg the Reactionary.” Schoenberg and His World . ed. Walter

Frisch. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.Campbell, Mary Schmidt. “New Trends in Cultural Policy for the Twenty-First Century.” Social

Text 59 (Summer 1999): 5-15.“Consumer.” Online Etymology Dictionary 2001

<http://www.etymonline.com/index.phpsearch=consumer&searchmode=none>Cowell, Henry. “Who is the greatest living composer?” Northwest Musical Herald (1933).Dembski, Stephen and Joseph N. Straus. Milton Babbitt: Words About Music . Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Grout, Donald J. and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music . 6th ed. New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, 2001.Hagen, Uta with Haskel Frankel. Respect for Acting . Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons,

Inc., 1973.Kamien, Roger. Music: An appreciation . New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc, 1994.Mathieu, W. A. Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern

Expression. Rochester, VT.: Inner Traditions International, 1997.“Patron.” Online Etymology Dictionary 2001

<http://www.etymonline.com/index.phpsearch=patron&searchmode=none>Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century . New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 2007Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1967.Smith, Geoff, and Nicola Walker Smith. New Voices: American Composers Talk About Their

Music. Portland: Amadeus Press, 1995.Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches. Ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Webster, James. “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: 'First Viennese

Modernism' and the Delayed Nineteenth Century.” 19th-Century Music 25.2/3 (Autumn 2001 – Spring 2002): 108-126.

Whittall, Arnold. “Twentieth-Century Music in Retrospect:Fulfi llment or Betrayal?” The Musical Times 140/1869 (Winter 1999): 11-21.