New Music reBlog

If we can agree on two propositions, I have some faith that all the rest will fall into place. Let's posit a musical idiom that I think most of you have heard or can imagine: thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand. Proposition 1: not every thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand piece that's been written is a masterpiece, worth listening to over and over again. Some pieces in that late-20th-century idiom are merely tedious and unclear, confusing rather than profound. I hope everyone concerned (except for Frank Oteri, who prides himself on a Zenlike appreciation for every piece that's ever come into existence, simply for existing) can agree on this much. 

The second proposition may be a little more difficult to get universal agreement on among non-musicians. Proposition 2: at least some thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand pieces are beautiful and profound, and those listeners who come to know them well derive immense pleasure from them. In short, within the wide world of thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music, we're going to draw a theoretical line. On the profound side of this line, for instance, I would place Bruno Maderna's Grande Aulodia, which is like ear-candy for me, and also Luigi Nono's late string quartet Fragmente: Stille, an Diotima. On the confused and unrewarding side of that line I might place as example Charles Wuorinen's Concerto for Cello and Ten Instruments, which I excitedly bought a score of as a teenager, and which ever since has served me as an emblem of pretentious musical gobbledygook. But it doesn't matter which pieces, or even which percentage of pieces, you put on which side of that line - as long as you'll simply agree with me that there's a line, we can continue. 

All I'm asking you to do is dissociate the qualities complexity and quality. Complexity does not guarantee that a piece of music is great, nor does it guarantee that a piece of music is bad. Put that way, I don't think even our friend Frank can disagree. 

(Already now, though, two people have written to express suspicion that if I think some complex music is no good, then I must secretly think that all simple music, or all tonal music is good. Aside from such assertions being patently ridiculous, there would be no logic whatever in such a leap of thought. Like, "You don't like some kinds of chocolate? Then you must love everything that's vanilla!" But in general musicians are not very good at logic, and this is the kind of fallacy that these arguments of musical style get caught up in.) 

As is pretty clear, the Nonken argument does its level best to ignore Proposition 1 ("Vote NO on Proposition 1!"), and the Byrne argument ignores, or even disputes or refuses to acknowledge, Proposition 2. Yet to ignore either of them negates the deeply-felt experiences of large swaths of people. Of course there are thousands of musicians who have been deeply and positively affected by some thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music that would have seemed opaque and unpleasant to my grandmother. Byrne's view (as he expressed it, and perhaps he doesn't believe it as simplistically as he said it, but he gave voice to a common formulation) is a cliché, the cliché of Evil Modern Music, but it is not a cliché that was made up out of whole cloth. Clearly a lot of people think music went off some kind of deep end in the 20th-century, and became (temporarily) self-delusional. As a critic, as a composer, as a person, I have an obligation to acknowledge both sets of opinions; I can't tell either my composing colleagues nor the musical audience I used to write for that their perceptions are totally neurotic - at least without losing credibility with one set or the other. Much of my life has been spent on this dividing line.

Let's take that opinion that classical music went off some kind of deep end in the 20th-century, and became self-delusional. There is absolutely no way to assess the sanity of this assertion without dividing the music alluded to into several repertoires with different reception histories:

Comparing the reception history of this music with that of the next category is complicated by the fact that Europe and the U.S. have such different musical cultures. In Europe an immense festival culture grew up around serialism, which gave a convincing appearance that there was more public support for the music over there. Some Americans, like Rzewski, came to write more opaque music after expatriating to Europe, as though that had more success there, and it probably did. Nevertheless, I always think of the parents I once met of an exchange student at my son's elementary school. They were from Graz, Austria, and I mentioned that I was aware of a prestigious contemporary music festival there. They said, "Oh, the music they play there is terrible, all this horrible modern stuff. We go every year."

Whether you agree with my characterizations here is really not important. What's important is that contemporary classical music got a terrible public reputation in the mid-20th century, and while composers at first defended the music, at some point, even many of us began to concede that something had gone wrong. Where one draws the line that got crossed over (1945, 1970, serialized rhythm, pitch-set analysis) is immaterial. Certainly recent reception history suggests that some of that bad rep was unfair - and some, Frank, will argue that all of it is unfair, but many composers of my generation, myself included, cannot not go that far. Camus wisely said, "You are what other people think you are," and Morton Feldman's grandmother used to tell him, "When three people tell you you're drunk, lie down." There is a factual basis to the Byrne argument that it simply does not do us any good to ignore. At the same time, we need the Nonken argument so that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, those two arguments complete each other. We can't accurately describe the 20th century without both of them.

One of the arguments that composers bring up over and over again to buttress the Nonken argument is that all composers write the way they do from deep inner compulsion, and so there's nothing they (or you) can do about it. I simply don't buy this. It does not accord with my experience. It's true of some composers, and maybe they're the ones saying it, or perhaps it is a romanticization of the creative artist by their enablers. I've seen too much evidence to the contrary. I had a brilliant, ambitious student once who studied scores by composers who won prizes - thinking that if he could write the way they did, maybe he could win prizes too. I've known composition teachers who told their students, "Here's how you write a piece of music," and the student followed instructions and got in the habit of composing that way - often being well rewarded for doing so because the teacher, pleased with their obedience, afterward helped them get awards and commissions. Even I myself have been known to depart from my usual stylistic inclinations in order to accommodate the sensibilities of the people who gave the commission, who might want something more "classical-sounding" and emotive (or possibly just easier to perform) than my usual fare. 

Much music, much good music, is written the way it is because the composer has gotten so excited about hitherto underused ramifications of the musical structures she's found in other people's music that she sees a wonderful creative opportunity to take music in a new direction based on those ramifications. That's probably the core paradigm (or at least, it's the more professionally realistic version of the composer "having something deep within her soul to express"). But a composer's idiom is influenced by a hundred forces, some unconscious, some carefully calculated, some financial, some vain, some noble, some inspired, some in habitual response to academic training. The audience's reflexive skepticism toward new music is, in itself, no more unjust than the skepticism with which you are approaching this article right now - waiting for me to show my hand, waiting to catch me in some fallacy. 

It seems to me that I haven't said a controversial or non-commonsensical thing here yet, though I will. To create a healthy musical culture, we need a shared reality. The Nonkens need to admit to the Byrnes that upon occasion a composer has wasted the audience's time with a pompous, confused piece written in ambitious but misguided imitation of earlier works; the Byrnes need to admit to the Nonkens that music may be capable of wonderful large-scale effects that one needs experience and a well-conditioned ear to hear. Where audiences and where composers will tend to draw the line will always differ, and that's good: it gives us a big gray area to argue about, and art is always furthered by being argued about. But nothing is to be gained by claiming that the composers have never, ever been at fault, nor by denying that audience members could gain something from extending their listening capacities.

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So far so good, I hope. 

I read the first three chapters of Finnegans Wake once. I laughed, I cried, it was marvelous. For years I thought at some point I'd go back and finish the book, but with each passing year it looks a little more doubtful. It's an incredible, heady pleasure, like nothing else in the world, but fully absorbing that pleasure takes considerable time and energy. Maybe when I'm retired. 

What if there were dozens of books like Finnegans Wake? I hear that there are. I haven't read any William Gaddis, I never finished a Thomas Pynchon novel, and I bought Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil because of its connection with the composer Jean Barraqué, but didn't get very far into it. And I'm a voracious reader, always have a couple of books going at least. I'm sure all those books are very good. If I were a literature professor or reviewer of books, I would have dutifully taken the time to get through all that stuff. But I'm just a pleasure reader, except for when I'm reading things for my own scholarship. 

As a music aficionado and writer, I did do all that for many behemoths of 20th-century music. I combed Sinfonia for quotations, analyzed the entire tempo structure of Gruppen, listened repeatedly to Barraqué's Sonata and looked at the score, went through Carter's Double Concerto countless times, devoured Boulez's On Music Today and painstakingly compared its prescriptions to Le Marteau, read Babbitt's articles and book, and did my homework. I sometimes notice, though, that the big, complex pieces that I've really gotten to know well were ones I studied back between 1973 and 1986, when I was in school and just afterward, before I started at the Village Voice, before my son was born, when I had plenty of time on my hands. The crazes for Helmut Lachenmann and Gerard Grisey came along later in my career. I've listened to their CDs at times and thought, "Well, if I had time to listen to this over and over, maybe I'd start to get more out of it." And, a couple years later, I've listened again - and put the CDs back with exactly the same thought. That today's grad students find Lachenmann and Grisey as exciting as I once found Wolpe and Maderna, and consider me something of an old fogey for not hopping on the bandwagon, makes perfect sense. They've got the time, and the available memory. New experiences make a deeper and quicker impression on them, as they once did on me.

The qualities of complexity and opacity do not guarantee that a piece is good, as we've established above, nor do they guarantee that a piece is bad, as we've also established. It takes time, working one's way slowly into each piece, work by work, to judge how good something is. The question is, of course: how much complex, opaque music can the world afford? How many more complex, opaque pieces can I be expected to internalize in my life than the couple hundred or so I've already absorbed? New CDs arrive in the mail every week. According to the paradigm by which musicians usually talk about music, when a CD contains simple music, I probably listen to it once, say "That's nice," and then put it on the shelf; and when the CD is of complex music, I listen to it over and over, getting more from each new exposure. But what actually happens is closer to the opposite: when the music is relatively simple, it has a visceral impact on me, and soon I want to hear it again, and it starts becoming part of my mental audio furniture, and I start writing about it and recommending it to people. And when the music is complex, I'm more likely to say, "Well, if I had time to listen to this over and over, maybe I'd start to get more out of it." Some of those CDs never get listened to again. For others, the second and third listenings are much like the first.

The defenders of musical complexity already have their angry fingers on the "comments" button, but wait - musical complexity needs no defense from me. I love Pli selon pli, remember? I bet I know more of Maderna's music than you do. That, at this point in my life, composers who can get their main musical ideas across in a listening or two get more of my attention than those who demand 12 or more listenings plus some reading and analysis is not a sign that I am superficial of soul. It is a sign that I am no longer a grad student, and that I am swamped with responsibilities. (I remember, when I studied with him in 1975, Morton Feldman being particularly caustic on this point. He'd criticize a student's piece as unclear, and the student would protest, "But you have to listen to the piece more than once," and Feldman would sneer, "Kid's 21, and he thinks I'm going to listen to his fuckin' piece twice.") (Maybe he didn't say fuckin', but it was clearly implied.) You can say, because it is one's duty to say so, that the pleasures that come from complex music run much deeper than those that come from simple music, and that the time spent getting familiar with a difficult masterpiece will pay off much more than the ten easier pieces I might have studied in the same span. But this hasn't uniformly been my experience. In my imagination, I think of Nono's Stille, an Diotima and Bill Duckworth's relatively simple Time Curve Preludes as being about equally great pieces; but the truth is, I haven't listened to the Nono in ten years, and I feel a need for the Preludes at least a couple of times a year. 

Another popular escape hatch: "You don't need to understand complex music to enjoy it, just sit back and experience it." Yet something tells me that if I simply listened to Ferneyhough's [Ha! I mentioned him] Transcendental Etudes as passively as I do to Cage's Winter Music, I would miss many of the crucial things Ferneyhough put into it. (I actually heard Ferneyhough lecture about that piece at the U. of Chicago, so I know something of how it works. I like it OK. Don't listen to it often.) I think, too, that had I taken that Cagean approach years ago to Boulez and Stockhausen (or hell, Cage, for that matter), I wouldn't today enjoy their music on as many levels as I do. I'm not opposed to the idea that a repertoire might necessitate score analysis and book reading to fully appreciate it. I just don't know how many more composers I'm going to have time to do that with in my life, nor how many the avid lay music lover ought to be expected to study similarly. Nor do I, as a result, find composers I've done that with - like Boulez and Stockhausen - deeper or more appealing than composers like Virgil Thomson or William Schuman who never necessitated any such study. 

Allow me a brief detour. There is an ancient tradition in aesthetics, and a wise one, I think, that simplicity in art is a virtue. I insist that one of the things we proved in the 20th century is that it is not a necessary virtue, that it may not be the best virtue - but it remains a virtue. Some will recognize the following quotations from my writing:

And allow me to add one more quote which will haunt you forever, my fellow Americans, a quotation that has appeared in countless books, and that will live as long as American music itself lives:

Aaron Copland, of course, about the time he wrote El Salon Mexico. Modernists draw a narrative around Copland that his thorny Variations for piano was a great, forward-looking work, while Billy the Kid was a terrible backsliding into mindless populism. But as Copland expert Larry Starr has aptly and truly written, "not only is this ballet score as sterling an illustration of Copland's basic methods as either the Piano Variations or Music for the Theatre; it also reveals these methods at a stage of greater maturity and refinement." Starr's right: study the scores, and you'll see that Billy the Kid is a more sophisticated score, gunfight and all, than the Variations. Copland did not weaken his music in simplifying it - he sharpened it.

Here's that escape hatch: Anyone who's an obsessed fan of a particular complex, opaque piece can always claim that what that piece expresses couldn't possibly be expressed any more simply, and it's a claim pretty much impervious to opposing rhetoric. Thank god for the ambiguity and subjectivity of art, and there will be no Q.E.D. at the end of this article. What he cannot claim, though, I insist, is that music generally improves with complexity and opacity, nor that simplifying can't sometimes sharpen a composer's art. At the very least, complexity and opacity tend to withdraw a piece of music from the public sphere, while simplifying increases its public availablility. Ives's most public image, after all, is one of his simplest and (yet) most powerful pieces, The Unanswered Question. 

It is, for me, a sign of generosity in a composer, of his urgency in wanting to reach me, that he is willing to work to sharpen his musical argument by simplifying it as far as he can without falsifying it. And before someone assumes that I am carrying arround some boneheaded, dumbass notion of simplicity, I do not mean reduction to quarter-notes and eigth-notes, but rather the streamlining and agreement of all elements of a piece to create a unified, singular impression. I hear now and then that some stranger thinks my Private Dances is my best piece; it is certainly my simplest piece, though there are some pretty hairy rhythms in it (including a dance in 29/4 meter). Like Copland, I sometimes take great pains to simplify what I try to say in my music for maximum public effect, and those pieces seem to get across well; other times, I want to do something that just won't reduce to simpler terms, and only my fellow composers realize what I've done. I've always thought Beethoven got the proportions right: he wrote an Eroica Symphony and a Ninth Symphony that showed the masses exactly what he was about, then a Grosse Fuge and an Op. 111 Sonata that made most of his contemporaries think he was mad. Had all of Beethoven's music been as dense and counterintuitive as his last sonatas and string quartets, we would still consider him a genius today, but he would have come down to us as a much smaller, more eccentric figure. 

What does this portend for the would-be composer of complex, opaque music? Of course he is free to write what he wants, keeping aware that as the amount of complex, opaque music in the world grows, the time available for the dramatic needs of his own contribution shrink in proportion. He is content, of course - naturally! - to settle for a very small, very serious audience. If such a composer wants his music to reach an avid but beleaguered music lover in middle age such as myself, the want of the virtue of simplicity will need to be made up for by some pretty dazzling compensatory virtues. Failing that, he will always have for his audience the grad students - who have time and incentive to decipher his intricacies, and who may well continue to love his music into their dotage for the intellectual challenges it provided them in youth.