8. Postmodern Music
This essay is based on an article that appeared in the Boston Review in April 1987 under the title “Is There a Postmodern Music?” as part of a series on postmodernism. It may be of interest to recall some of the questions raised in the earlier days of the movement though they are less pressing now.
Musicologists, critics, and even the public are usually so eager to codify, categorize, and label that it is quite surprising the slogan “postmodern” has accumulated so little mileage among them.[1] The attraction of a label for any movement in the arts is the function it serves to encapsulate its reason for being. As Wallace Stevens observed in remarks quoted earlier, modern art “has a reason for everything. Even the lack of a reason becomes a reason.” Where postmodern music is concerned, just what was subsumed under the rubric was not altogether clear to many of us at first and may not be clear even now. We could only infer from its sporadic occurrences what manner of creative effort it was likely to embrace within its domain. As I looked into the matter I recognized that the concept was more prevalent within the area of music than I had thought it was. Any aspirationsons anyone's part, however, that it might replace the essential twentieth-century tradition, it is fortunate to relate, were promptly shattered. That tradition, it has been seen, was by the middle of the century what is generally referred to as “serialism,” “atonality,” or “twelvetone composition.” For some time listeners had regarded serialism as a “modern” tendency—modern in the sense of being advanced, problematic, and of today—or indeed, of tomorrow: “music of the future” in Wagner's notorious formulation. But suddenly we were confronted with something like an oxymoron. The directive came down from the manipulators of propaganda in the field
Now it is perfectly true that one may legitimately ask how long can a work like Schoenberg's Five Orchestra Pieces, Op. 16 of 1908, remain “modern” in the sense of contemporary. Many listeners still find it challenging and “dissonant,” and those are the attributes that they consider as defining “new” music or what they are accustomed to call “modern,” blissfully ignoring the requirement that it be contemporary. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was chagrined when it had to face the fact that according to a stipulation in her will the paintings of van Gogh and Seurat, bequeathed to it by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who died in 1948, had to be surrendered to other museums at the close of the twentieth century since she felt that they could no longer be classifiable as “modern.”
Another semantic problem arises with the assimilation of “modern,” a concept notorious for its aggressive innovation, to “academic.” Since in the twentieth century “academic” long signified composers who had persisted in pursuing the well worn paths of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which posed no problems to either composer or listener, it is paradoxical to find the label applied to composers who do pose a challenge, whose work was (and still is) less accessible to average listeners than most music they hear. The serialists were not called “academic” simply because academe was now their haven (though this helped). By throwing in epithets like “austere” and “arid,” critics left no doubt that they were giving their impression of the music and pointing up serialism's reputation for being cerebral and systematic as well as without feeling.
When he was still a New York Times music reviewer, before he assumed the influential post of editor of the Sunday arts section, John Rockwell used the phrases “uptown” and “downtown.” Serialism was “uptown,” referring to the New York area where the squares hung out with their old-fashioned concert halls and Lincoln Center. “Downtown” was where the action was—the SoHo lofts and art galleries. The sentiment downtown was that after almost a century of pulling its weight Schoenberg's legacy should be declared moribund. You did not find the avatars of “the North-eastern serial establishment” there. While the denizens of SoHo were likely to deplore the fact that serialism dominated the college music curriculum, they no doubt found it natural that it should take the place once
The music we once called “modern” was now regarded as “academic” but the fragmentation and rhythmic asymmetries, the absence of catchy tunes and tone centers, the relative novelty of this putative “academic” music offered none of the comforting familiarity of the earlier academics, the Romanticists—composers like Daniel Gregory Mason or Howard Hanson. But if the old academics were scarcely played anymore, you still could find this comforting familiarity, curiously enough, in the much-touted scions of a “new” faith, the so-called post-Romanticists: George Rochberg and David Del Tredici. The question arises why these latter-day Romanticists should have been considered to be representatives of “new” music when they were not very different from the early twentieth-century academic Romanticists or even from those Romanticists who had been around for decades as part of a well-established line of moderates—composers like William Schuman, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem. In the cases of Rochberg and Del Tredici their rejection of their earlier serialism was the kind of act that some may have considered courageous and that gave their conversion its cachet. It would certainly be taken into account, as we shall see, by believers in postmodernism, for whom it would enhance the reception of the music even though it had nothing to do with the direct listening experience. Bernard Holland, until recently chief music critic of the New York Times, suggested a telling metaphor for the new Romanticists when he wrote that Rochberg's music “does remind us of the frontiersman who, having fought his way arduously through badlands and hostile Indians to the promised West, abruptly decides to settle in Philadelphia.”[2]
Postmodernism must be what Rockwell had in mind when he declared, “Rochberg eagerly embraced the suddenly fashionable notion that modernism had failed.”[3] Serialism was the “modern” that these composers had left behind. It is interesting that what postmodern art critics said (and still say) about Abstract Expressionism (the abstract side of it) some times sounds like what music critics have been saying about serialism though the two are very different—to wit, registering complaints about formalist practices that are considered modern by their practitioners but, so the argument goes, are no longer modern in the sense of contemporary.
An important aspect of postmodern aesthetics has been the goal of creating art that is accessible—accessibility is still the rallying cry in general today.
Another important concern of postmodernists in all the arts is not to have their return to nineteenth-century Romanticism or their tendency to arrogate to themselves the finished works of others confused with neoclassicism. They do not at all approve of the tension that arises in neoclassicism, as I have already remarked—the tension, that is to say, resulting from the way in which the present interacts with the past. Postmodern literary critics find this tension unacceptable in T. S. Eliot, and postmodern composers have had the same feeling when they encounter it in Stravinsky. This attitude may be detected in the pains to which the writer of liner notes for a Del Tredici LP went to tell us that the composer's “new tonal writing has been achieved with an enlivening spontaneity, rather than as the result of an agonized ‘rapprochement with the past.’”[4] As the literary critic Denis Donoghue puts it, for postmodernism “the past is not a terrible burden to sustain but a box of images to be resorted to for pleasure.”[5] Quotation among postmodern artists, far from provoking a struggle with the source, is likely to be altogether complacent, even literal—sometimes carried out to an extent that would normally be designated plagiarism, as in the instance of the artist Sherrie Levine displaying her reproductions of photographs of Walker Evans, signed by herself as her own works.
The degree to which post-Romanticism shares the orientation of the postmodernists is verified among other things by a concern with accessibility and a fascination with cloning nineteenth-century composers. It is also worthy of note that though Cage was active before the slogan gained currency in the field of music, postmodernists have claimed him. As an example of postmodern usage, Donoghue observes, Cage's “music is as hospitable to street noises as to silence or Mozart.”[6] (It is not literally true but it gives a general idea of the aspect of Cage that is considered postmodern.) In many ways Cage's contribution to twentieth-century culture is more significant for the other arts than for music. Its conceptual nature has its counterpart in the visual arts through the medium of so-called conceptual art—what one reads or is told about a painting is more important than
The aesthetic boggles the mind (I'm sure it is supposed to). I am, it is true, an old fossil. But this is not what I was brought up to believe art by its essence is. All art is presentative. Music presents auditory relations to an attentive, unanaesthetized listener (which leaves out those in a drug-induced stupor) within a given period of time. Though we get the gist of alecture reported by a reliable auditor, a report of a musical performance yields nothing at all of the heard quality of the aesthetic experience, though it may describe its style and advance an opinion as to its worth. There is a touch of pedantry in art works that depend for their effect on what we are told about them. Take Cage's notorious 4′33″ (the silent piece of 1952 originally for piano). How do you know a piece is in progress if you are not informed such is the case? It is important to have a well-known and admired pianist sitting before the keyboard so that the disappointment of not hearing any sound emanating from the instrument is all the greater. I remember on one occasion when the piece was performed some laughter and noisy conversation passed between myself and a neighbor, as a result of which we were shushed by conscientious auditors. Afterwards when I apologized to John he told me it was exactly the kind of random event he hoped for—blithely unperturbed by contradicting himself, since at other times he had insisted that his purpose was to provide a brief period of silence for people in this noisy world.
I met Cage many years before any of us heard of postmodernism. It was 1937. Esther was driving our new Ford convertible (I almost never drove) with the top down, and we had just entered the campus of Mills College in Oakland, California, where I would teach for two years though this was my first visit. Two young men stopped us to greet us since they seemed to know, perhaps from photographs, who I was. They were John Cage and Lou Harrison, auxiliary faculty members whose role was to supply musical accompaniment for the activities and classes of the Martha Graham-school dance professor Marian van Tuyl. The California sky was crystal clear but Harrison said, in a dark monotone that suggested some Eastern guru before
Cage had something else on his mind. He asked my wife, “Do you have a wash-boiler? I lost ours.” Now a wash-boiler even in those days was an obsolete affair that no one used any longer or could even identify. It was a large, handsome, oval-shaped, copper pot over two feet long and standing about a foot and a half high. Clothes were boiled in it to thoroughly clean them. Later when I attended a dance concert of the Mills students I found out what Cage and Harrison did with it. They would fill it with water, hit a gong with a mallet, and immerse the gong so that the sound would slide down in pitch in the manner of a siren in reverse. My impression at the time was that they came up with the far-out ideas together. It would seem that Cage was the one with the missionary zeal and posture to become a celebrity on the basis of them.
No, indeed, musicians in general have not taken to the expression “post-modern.” On the basis of a small unscientific random poll, I found they guessed it must refer to the Cage variety of music, since it seemed reasonable to their way of thinking that what lies beyond current modernism should be still more modern.[8] On the other hand, they were surprised to hear that an ostensible conservative like Del Tredici might be considered apostmodernist. They had not enjoyed the benefits of being enlightened by sophisticated postmodern reasoning such as that we heard from the distinguished architectural critic Charles Jencks under the rubric “dual coating” —namely, “the mixture of meanings, popular and elite, which could be read by different groups of people, on different levels.”[9] It is an interesting notion that merits some thought, but music, being deployed in time, presents problems since the two levels can scarcely be independent when conveyed simultaneously. A simple line sounding as a counterpoint to acomplex one will be overpowered and absorbed by the latter.
To apply “dual coating” to a musical situation, let us suppose listeners find themselves seduced, since Del Tredici is such a fine musician, by the loveliness of his evening-long Child Alice (1977–81) when they start to listen. But his superb musicality and sensitivity are not enough to prevent the lingering pastiche of familiar Romantic sources from becoming tiresome as they wait for the “elite” (in Jencks's sense) moments at which the composer enters the scene with his own inspirations to redeem what has already transpired—those few and far-between moments where there is any
Another post-Romanticist who probably has the qualifications to be labeled a postmodernist is Frederic Rzewski, an American composer who is better known in Europe than in the United States. He has been somewhat more successful in dealing with the two “levels.” In The People United Will Never Be Defeated for solo piano (1957), the variation form provides the condition for the proximity of the two levels and the politically radical Chilean tune affords a sure means of unifying them. But even so, his forceful musicianship and brilliant keyboard writing do not compensate for the feeling we may have that he is unconvincingly apportioning out his favors—now a variation for the elite, now one for the workers. Marc Blitzstein, author-composer of The Cradle Will Rock, warned us in 1936that the mass audience will have to learn how to listen intelligently and expressed the hope that a more efficient means of training for that audience would someday be developed. (The same sentiment inspired that gem of a song by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, “In Praise of Learning,” with the opening words, “We must be ready to take over” so we will be better educated to do the job right when we hold the reins of government and power.) Postmodernists in general would do well to heed Blitzstein's warning, since aiming at the lowest common denominator has not proved to be the most propitious way to reach the public.
Choice of idiom, I must admit, is really the composer's affair. It is his privilege, if he so desires, to raid the nineteenth century for his language and impose upon himself the near impossible task of achieving freshness in a medium so used up. Artists must have a grip on themselves to prevent them from an automatic response to the dictates of their ingrained technique. Nothing exposes them to the danger of being controlled by it rather than controlling it as much as working with materials that are too familiar and that constantly present their own well-worn solutions. Still, we would hope that artists would not be guided in their choice of direction either by the marketplace or by any notion of historic inevitability. If they still in all
Mapping this mode of appreciation on to Child Alice, for example, we would have to contemplate Del Tredici's disavowal of his early twelve-tone practice and his disarming admission that he slipped back into tonality because it seemed appropriate for Lewis s. Or perhaps there is a message in the music's obsessiveness—Del Tredici being even more repetitious than almost any Romanticist as a caricature of one of the least endearing aspects of Romanticism.
I cannot help feeling I am back in the classroom, fighting the tyranny of teachers who insist that we cannot appreciate a work without knowing the influences upon it, its date, the origin of its form, the temper of the times in which it was written, and details of the composer's life and loves. Program notes that provide things like this to think about may relieve the boredom of listeners who have difficulty keeping their minds on the music;but if anything exudes the stale odor of the academy it is surely this type of information gathering. It is ironic that this discussion started out by questioning the use of the epithet “academic” for the serialists only to find that it applies more appropriately to the latter-day Romanticists to the extent that they are postmodern. If listening is to be so conceptual, so dependent on what is not directly presented to unanaesthetized attention, it will be so different in essence from what we have traditionally assumed listening to be that it would seem to constitute a new branch of the arts almost as different from music as dance is. Though I hesitate to foretell the future, I cannot help suspecting that, far from posing a threat to modernism within the evolution of the essential music, postmodernism will be something we look back upon as a fringe movement—in the realm of music at least, since Jencks makes it sound so apposite to architecture. Change need not be linear. There is every reason to believe that postmodernism will not become part of music's mainstream and will not, in the longer view of things, replace
Thus, contrary to the claims that we may be at the end of an era and the start of a new one, possibly a postmodern one, it seems to me we are witnessing composers consolidating the gains of one of the most radical shifts in music's evolution—the shift away from tonality. For anything comparable we must reach back to 1600 when monody emerged to take the place of polyphony. It required a century and a half before the implications of that revolution began to be realized in the time of Mozart and Haydn. Monteverdi was the central figure in that reform—very loosely, what Schoenberg was to us. By 1650, after Monteverdi's death, the scene was quiet. It was a period of waiting for some significant developments of the experiments of 1600. Several fine composers kept monody alive, while others clung to the old polyphony, ultimately producing a giant who was so out of style that he was barely noticed until the nineteenth century. Need I provide his name? Hardly, but I will anyway: J. S. Bach.
The point is that after Monteverdi, composers nurtured the new monody for over a century until it was ready to flower in the wondrous manifestations of the Classical era. This is how we should be nurturing the trends that some disdainfully call “modernist.” The practitioners of serialism and those working in techniques that developed out of it make-up a flourishing group in their own bailiwick, where they have established a strong creative environment—precisely what is needed for important new work to develop. New ideas cannot grow in a void. Even composers who seek a more accessible language would do well to fashion it out of the extant tradition instead of wiping the slate clean and, in the manner of some post-Romanticists, pretending that the twentieth century had never existed.
The lull that must have existed around 1700 was of a kind that could very well have brought in its wake an impatience on the part of those who were not content to use the present to consolidate their gains. We have certainly had composers like that in our century. For them music must advance loudly and naughtily, upsetting one dogma after another. For example, in the years from just before World War I to the Wall Street crash we had atonality, neo-primitivism, expressionism, post impressionism, polytonality, microtone experiments, Italian Futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, Gebrauchsmusik, neoclassicism, the Groupe des Six, etc. Later, writings on music were haunted by evocations of that bad boy era, some rejoicing that things were back to normal, others lamenting the absence of the sensational until John Cage came along in the forties to turn things so