1. TRENDS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICAN COMPOSITION
1. Composers and Their
Audience in the Thirties
When Arnold Schoenberg, having fled Nazi Germany, came to Boston in 1933 to teach at the short-lived Malkin Conservatory of Music, a storymade the rounds to the effect that Richard Burgin, concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had had a conversation with the celebrated composer in which he proudly announced that some years earlier he had given the first Boston performance of Pierrot Lunaire. Schoenberg expressed surprise that so difficult and “advanced” a composition had been played in Boston. But there was not the slightest display of gratitude or pleasure; instead, Schoenberg looked perturbed. It seems he had somehow got the impression that the performance had taken place in Symphony Hall, which was the only Boston concert venue he knew, and all he could say was that it was much too large for a work like that. Burgin attempted to relieve his anxiety by explaining that Boston had a smaller place for major concerts, the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall, seating about a thousand, and it was only natural that the work should have been played there. “Yes,” said Schoenberg, “but even that is too large for Pierrot.” “I know,” replied Burgin, “but maestro, the hall was not full.” “That's much better,” was Schoenberg's response and he was obviously relieved.
The anecdote may very well have been the fabrication of some pundit. But this would not affect its appeal to musicians as a metaphor for Schoenberg's claim that he was addressing a small and intellectually elite audience, and true or false, it gave them an opportunity to air their conviction that there was something a bit foolish about an individual disdaining a large and conceivably adoring public. I wonder if it occurred to anybody that in those days Schoenberg was well aware that among a thousand people there would be a sufficient number who despised atonality and would accordingly manifest
Nobody likes being excluded from anything, and to be excluded from something that is purported to be a universal art naturally breeds resentment. There is a further factor that enters into the equation, a factor of apolitical nature that exacerbates and seems to justify resentment. In the old days when the aristocracy was in power, they were the ones who cultivated and supported the fine arts. The arts were theirs just as in a previous era the arts had been what has often been referred to as the “handmaiden” of the church. When the age of the aristocracy had passed, the concept of “art for the few” became a mark of privilege, a means for the bourgeoisie to identify itself with aristocracy.[1] If there is any residue today of this propensity of the wealthy to use the arts to advertise their wealth, it is more likely to take the peripheral form of buying costly twentieth-century paintings or purchasing a box (where they still exist) at the symphony, or opera seats at today's stratospheric prices, though we still sometimes find wealthy individuals, big corporations, or foundations supporting artisticventures from square one.
It is not surprising that your average member of the audience for serious music should be inclined to assimilate to the rich man's “art for the few” the exclusivity fostered by the kind of difficulty that much innovative twentieth-century music imposes on the listener. This was a factor particularly to be reckoned with during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the thirties, when democracy in America was at its peak and anew liberalism cast its spell over thinkers and artists of many persuasions who were also responding to the dialectical materialism and Marxist ideology emanating from Soviet Russia and still at a stage when they were found promising.
Many of us started to feel embarrassed at excluding the masses when we wrote music that they found inaccessible or accessible with difficulty. We need not have been card-carrying Party members, and we had no wish toover throw the American government. We had our infighting as followers of either Leon Trotsky or Joseph Stalin, but during the mid-thirties many of us viewed Socialism in Russia through rose-colored glasses. We were known as “fellow-travelers,” and we mingled with the faithful at endlessmeetings where the subject of how to communicate to the masses was ardently thrashed out and the tendency of the artist to take refuge in “escapism” was bitterly reviled. Around that time the intellectuals were quite concerned about being accused of escapism. Even that businessman-poet Wallace Stevens, who you would think was beyond such things, felt he had
Ex. 1. “Into the Streets May First,” New Masses, 1 May 1934
Occasionally someone would assume a more active role, as when Aaron Copland wrote a song for the picket line, “Into the Streets May First,” which won a prize in a contest sponsored by the Communist-controlled Composers Collective and was published in the Communist mouthpieceNew Masseshi in its May Day issue (i May 1934). It is very surprising indeed that a composer who, as everyone knows, soon afterwards developed a manner that was so wide in its appeal and at the same time of such fineworkmanship should so miscalculate the musical capacities of a worker ona picket line. The modulation to E-flat major in the fourth bar before the singer has had a chance to get into the song would give your worker quitea bit of trouble on an actual picket line where there might be no accompaniment (Ex. i). Later there is a stretch in E major. Note also the peculiar syncopation in the second bar, giving the effect of a meter change fromfourfour to three-four. It was not Copland's finest hour, but the good intentions were there.
Since my book on Copland[3] appeared during a reactionary turn in political sentiment and at the height of what was known as a “witch hunt” for Communist sympathizers, namely in 1953, I thought it prudent not tomention the picket-line song. I also omitted any reference to the Young Composers Group that had formed with Copland as its mentor, since there were strong cleavages within it between Trotskyites and Stalinists that ledto violent clashes, and only someone with the equanimity of a Copland could restore peace. In protecting Copland by being cautious in this matter,
After being inured to the music of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Elliott Carter in the decades since its composition, wemay find it difficult to understand how Copland's seminal Piano Variationsof 1930 could have been found so disturbing and excessively demanding forlisteners all through the decade. The distance between what was consideredhis very percussive and austere manner of the early thirties and the accessible manner he would shortly afterward assume was a long one indeed, and it is remarkable that he negotiated it so quickly. Even within the moreenlightened artistic ambience of Germany, when the masterly pianist Walter Gieseking looked at the Piano Variations with the idea of programming it on his recitals, he decided that his audiences would not tolerate a work ofsuch “crude dissonances.”
Two more works in the category of Copland's tougher music were to follow in the next few years, Statements and Short Symphony, the latter and earlier of the two a work so much beyond the capacities of the orchestras of the time that though it was scheduled by both Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski shortly after its completion, they both were obliged toshelve it when they came face to face with its technical difficulties, especially its jagged lines and rhythmical demands. (Copland arranged it forsextet because of the problems he had over it with orchestras, and the result has been a truly powerful chamber work.) Koussevitzky could not evenstart to consider it owing to his limited technique, though he was otherwise dedicated to bringing all of Copland's orchestral music to light. Stokowskimade some attempt to study it, but was discouraged by its demands, returning to it, however, a decade later to give its U.S. premiere with his NBC Symphony, broadcasting from studio 8-H (more recently renowned for its Toscanini days). The players, Stokowski said, still found it very difficult. The first performance anywhere was conducted by Copland's close friendand fellow composer Carlos Chavez in Mexico (23 November 1934) withhis Orquesta Sinfonico, over which he had sufficient authority to exact the unusual number of ten rehearsals.[5]
By the middle of the decade the more “popular” Copland that most audiences now know emerged virtually without any transition—the composer of Lincoln Portrait, Billy the Kid, and the like. Indeed those audiencesto this day are usually quite unaware he has written any other kind of music, and some listeners who are aware of this other music have never quiteforgiven him for the periods when he abandoned his less accessible approach for a highly accessible one. They even sometimes tend to view hismore solid achievements with a certain suspicion, wondering whether the composer of the more popular works could really have been up to meetingthe demands.[6]
It was not until 1941 that Copland returned to the compositional approach that most discriminating composers admired in him. We had attendeddebates at the leftist cultural groups on the subject of what proletarian music should be without being in any way convinced that his workaday musicwas any solution of the problem. The naughty E-word which I mentionedearlier was “escapism.” That path had to be avoided at all costs. My ownway of coping with the dilemma as a good leftist sympathizer, who according to the directive from above should have been writing music for the “masses,” was to stop composing altogether in 1934, devoting myself instead to my other vocations of musicology and criticism until 1939. As for Copland, when he returned to his more exacting music he did not abandonthe practice he had cultivated to win the attention and admiration of awider audience, pursuing the two approaches for a while in tandem. Looking back in the forties he defended his appeal to a wider audience by pointing out: “an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radioand phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and continue writing asif they did not exist.”[7] In the forties one no longer spoke of a political motivation to reach the “masses.” It was pretty obvious that by then Marxist sympathies considered benign in the Roosevelt era were being frownedupon. It is not certain what made Copland return to his earlier manner. Perhaps he never intended to abandon it altogether. But cause and effect arealmost never a simple matter, one thing traceable to the other as a unique source.
In 1941 Copland's reversion to his abstract and tougher style of the earlythirties took the form of a piano sonata. I was delighted when I saw the scoreand immediately dispatched an article discussing it to Partisan Review:
The exaggerated determinism of a certain glib school of “sociological” criticism is recalled when Copland insists: “More and more weshall have to find a style which satisfies both us and them” —i.e., the composers who now constitute one another's audience and the radio-phonograph public. Nevertheless, it is interesting in this regard to consider Mozart's confession (in one of his letters) that he put certain effects in his music to please his patrons and he expected approval ofthese effects to be manifested in a way, moreover, that would currentlybe considered barbaric anywhere but at the ballet—namely, by applause during the music as each effect is heard, just as we now applauda pirouette.[8]
Copland was in Hollywood working on the score to the movie North Star when the article appeared, so I was surprised to receive a prompt response from him in a letter dated 10 April 1943. “Dear Arthur,” it began, “The other night while walking down Hollywood Blvd., I happened on acopy of the Partisan Review. Imagine my surprise when I came across yourpiece on the Piano Sonata. I wonder what made you not tell me about it—
When I call for a “style that satisfies both us and them,” I am mostlytrying to goad composers on toward what I think is a healthy direction. …I think also that for the sake of drawing sharp distinctions yourather overdo the dichotomy between my “severe” and “simple” styles. The inference is that only the severe style is really serious. I don't believe that. What I was trying for in the simpler works was only partlya larger audience; they also gave me a chance to try for a home-spunmusical idiom, similar to what I was trying for in a more hectic fashionin the earlier jazz works. In other words, it was not only musical functionalism that was in question, but also musical language.[9]
I have never been able to share the view that there was no sharp dichotomy between the two approaches, and Copland, notwithstanding the warm friendship that developed between us and that diminished only latein his life when he was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, was to persist inthe belief that I was one of the commentators responsible for his being castforever in the role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have come to appreciate the fine qualities of his ballet and movie scores and to recognize that the sequalities go well beyond what is required to fulfill their function. But works that lean heavily, for example, on compiled folk music—even those of Stravinsky and Bartok—are liable to give up their secret too easily. Thismusic can have its appeal to a discriminating listener, but some of us alsowant music that is tougher and more challenging. Henry James put it sowell in his preface to The Wings of the Dove in a comment quite in passingand between parentheses:
(The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of “luxury,” the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call it a luxury)[10]
Just what the nature of proletariat music should be—not only the workersongs but also the concert music for the masses—was a moot point in the early thirties. One of the leading spokesmen for the proposed genre wasironically one of our most farout composers, the experimentalist Henry
In the early debates, often highly agitated ones that took place at the leftist arts groups—the John Reed Club and the Rebel Arts Group for the artsin general, and for music the Pierre Degeyter Club (named after the composer of “L'Internationale”)—Cowell, obviously drawing on his own experience of putting dissonant tone clusters under folktunes, advocated dissonant accompaniments for the worker songs. The words, he argued, dealt optimistically with the future when increased freedom and happinesswould be the worker's reward, and they should be couched in music of the future. (The leftist jury of composers that awarded the prize to Copland'spicket-line song was also obviously thinking in more avantgarde musicalterms than the situation demanded.)
On the linguistic level there was the strong but ill-conceived tendencyto equate the word “progressive” in politics and the word “progressive” inart so that it applied in the most literal sense rather in the sense that a moreprogressive society may demand a more derivative, backward-looking art that is accessible to the masses. In Germany, for example, some painters operating under the slogan Neue Sachlichkeithi (New Objectivity) shortlyafter the October Revolution made claims of having “distorted reality topoint up social despair and a revolutionary political message.”[11] Judith Tickin her book on Ruth Crawford Seeger writes of the composer's passionate activism as well as that of her composer husband Charles Seeger around 1930. It seems that in a setting of some ricercari in her usual complexidiom, as Tick relates it, “By creating such profound opposition betweenvoice and piano—at one point Charles Seeger claimed they need only begin and end together—Crawford embodied class conflict into the musicitself.”[12]
The debates at the politically radical arts groups were not all confined tosophistry such as this. There was, among other things, the legitimate issueof whether it was required to “write down” to what nowadays we call the “dumbed down” audience, or whether the goal was to elevate that audience intellectually and in its tastes. But things were to change. As the thirtiesadvanced it was no longer to be a matter of argument. For worker songs the model was to be simple traditional folklike accompaniments and for orchestral music, though it was not officially spelled out, composers were tokeep someone like Tchaikovsky in mind despite his personal bourgeois leanings.
Even Dmitri Shostakovich found himself in trouble. After playing fortwo years to enthusiastic sold-out houses, in January 1936 his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was the subject of a scurrilous attack in Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet government. Shostakovich was scolded for his “formalism,” the severest censure that any composer could get in the USSR and one that could mean almost anything: in this case, probably hisdissonance (indeed “cacophony”), “musical chaos,” “bourgeois” vulgarity(the salacious plot, including fornication), and so on and on. It was also the year of the Moscow trials in which the government claimed there was aconspiracy involving some fifty leading officials, and it consequently boredown more than ever on the personal freedom of the citizenry. It tookabout two years for the ban on Shostakovich's music to be lifted and forhim to come back into favor, but he never recovered from the sense of intimidation, of being a hunted man, that came from the direction of authority watching over his shoulder.
When Shostakovich came to America in 1959 as a member of a contingent of Soviet composers (under the watchful eye of Soviet music's hatchetman Tikhon Khrennikov, who had the assignment of making sure thatnone of the composers got out of line) Boston was a stop on their tour in November, and some of us had the opportunity to question the celebrated musician at a reception given by Richard Burgin (the BSO concert master I mentioned at the very beginning of this essay, who, by the way, thought it would be too bourgeois to have domestic help for the affair and consequently gave his housekeeper a day off and hired no other assistance, notrealizing that successful Soviet composers lived in grand style). The subjectof serialism arose, and looking like a caged animal (he never smiled) Shostakovich said he did not want his hands tied. He was standing with hisback to the piano, and as if to illustrate his claim, he put his hands on the keyboard in back of him without playing. Could he also have been thinking of how the bureaucracy tied his hands?
I would not want to leave the impression that the Soviet crisis was uniquely responsible for the movement of American composers toward a simplermode of expression. The notion of simplifying communication in the finearts was very much in the air, and more than one development contributedto it—not least of all the WPA that Roosevelt instituted to relieve the staggering unemployment of the Great Depression. The original engineers of the project were thinking primarily of giving jobs to needy, unemployed blue collar workers, and it was quite a surprise when artists of all persuasions qualified for relief and got on the WPA rolls to pursue undertakingsthey had always pursued, except that the WPA sponsorship provided sustenance and audiences. The most visible naturally (no pun intended) werethe products of the painters who dedicated their talents to murals in publicbuildings—post offices in particular. This was not an occasion for esotericaor abstraction and they developed a fairly recognizable and simplistic style that has since become known as “WPA Art.”
For composers there were WPA orchestras and demands for music formodern dancers and the WPA theater. In 1934 I was asked by the curatorof the East Fifty-eighth Street branch of the New York Public Library (the Music Library in those days, where I practically took up residence, readingscores and music books, and listening to recordings) if I would be interestedin heading a WPA project that had the objective of publishing a catalog of American music for the dance. I said that I certainly would be but there wasthe problem of qualifying for relief before I could get on the WPA. My father and his second wife lived above their means in a small apartment in amodest hotel on West Seventysecond Street in Manhattan. They felt I wasnot entitled at twentyone to support and they could not afford it anyway. The most they could do besides providing some meals was to allow me tosleep on a daybed in the foyer. I relate this piece of intelligence as an example of what was involved in getting on the WPA. The point is the inspector who would visit me to determine if I were eligible for relief wouldnever agree if he or she found me in those days living in a hotel buildingwith an elevator. My explanation of the actual circumstances would be ofno avail. So I moved to a roominghouse—one of those brownstones in the West Seventies and Eighties that had once been posh single-family homes.
I never did get on relief. It took a long time and before the waiting period was up I received a fellowship to a newly formed Professional divisionof the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. Evidently there were otherways of participating in WPA activities, for example as honorary guest ifyou were famous and did not depend on the pittance WPA paid. For howelse would we have had the scion of the huge British pill conglomerate Sir
There were also special projects like the Composers Forum Laboratory established by an enterprising individual named Ashley Pettis. The ideawas to have, normally, two composers whose music is played and who arepresent to answer questions from the audience during the entire secondhalf of the evening. Pettis was skillful as moderator, with a poker face, never taking sides, and staving off foolish or indecent questions. He continued when there was no longer a WPA (“Laboratory” was dropped fromthe name), moving the project to San Francisco for two seasons at the startof World War II. Returning to New York, he resumed the forums under the auspices of the New York Public Library and Columbia University. In 1951, however, Pettis became a Roman Catholic priest, and though “Composers Forum” survives as a name, and there are replicas of the organization across the country, New York no longer has the regular series as it existed originally. Either the novelty has worn off, or there is too much competition from the plethora of new music groups and collectives that havesprung up and from concerts that have the composer on hand to participatein a panel (often with financial aid from an organization called Meet the Composer).
One of the notable consequences of the WPA projects in music was the emergence of symphony orchestras all over the country as a way of engaging the large number of unemployed instrumentalists. And on the podiumyou were likely to find not the formerly unemployed musicians but, as Ihave already mentioned, such eminent figures as Beecham, who, it is to beassumed, must have donated his services. This was not an isolated case because the WPA in New York also regaled us with the great Otto Klemperer, and Chicago had a fairly well established conductor by the name of Izler Solomon. It should be pointed out that the number of orchestras in America had been growing before the WPA helped the trend along. As Virgil Thomson once observed, “The 1930s witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the symphony orchestra into virtually every small town…. And they played American music, because Americans naturally enjoy American
World War II naturally solved the unemployment problem by providing work in the army and arms industry, and it was decided that the entire WPA project was no longer needed. The arts program, however, had growninto a major enterprise in the lives of the American people, and it seemeda pity to dismantle it. But any hope that it would be salvaged was shatteredby the change in the political climate. The powerful rightwingers of the time were all too cognizant of the circumstance that the WPA, especially it sarts program, was a product of the liberal thirties. One is reminded of the political right's hostility in recent years toward the National Endowmentfor the Arts, except that now the conflict, though politically motivated, hasrevolved around the question of alleged indecency more than around politics itself.
2. Nationalism
It was a happy coincidence that the cultivation of a music with American character should be a major concern of American composers in the decadeof the WPA for since about the mid-twenties they had been advocating that it was time for American music to “come of age”—a catch-phrase that I recall encountering rather frequently when I came onto the scene around 1930. One of the first achievements necessary to reach that goal, some ofus were pretty well convinced, was to establish an identity so that the music would be recognizable as American in the way that French music wasrecognizable as French and German music as German. A music based onthe national scene was also precisely what a country that supported it would expect. But there was mighty little of it before about 1920. Charles Ives had been writing distinctly American music since before the turn of the century but he had done so in oblivion. There had also been isolated instances like Copland's jazz concerto or Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune of 1928, which was not performed until 1945 with the composer conducting the New York Philharmonic.[1]
The quest for a national character is not to be confused with breastbeating patriotism, “my country right or wrong,” which is somethingmany of us involved in the tendency would vehemently disavow. So it is unfortunate that the rubric “Americanism” fits it so well and is the one commonly used since that locution carries an aura of discrimination against the foreign-born among us, and it has been exploited, as Edmund Wilson once pointed out, “to serve some very bad causes, and is now a wordto avoid.” I have never felt comfortable with the slogan “Americanism,” with its undercurrent of flagwaving, and so Wilson's admonition will beacceded to here and we shall find a very good alternative in “national character” or “nationalism.”[2]
One composer for whom this apologia seems quite unnecessary was Roy Harris, who was politically reactionary and boasted of it. In terms ofwhat his reputation is today it is hard to believe that Harris around the timeof his Third Symphony (1939) was one of the two best-known American composers, the other, of course, having been Copland. Harris made a bigpoint of claiming Beethoven as a model at the same time that he insisted onthe American style and content of his music. He offered as collateral hisbirthright to American sources for his inspiration, having been born on Lincoln's birthday and in Lincoln County on the Oklahoma Panhandle.[3] Heonce told me how important it was for him to feel at one with the American soil, and he confided in me that as a youth he would go out naked in uninhabited areas in the wildest storms to relish that feeling and to consolidate his identification with the western earth.(After age five he lived in California.)
The employment of folksong is, of course, no guarantee that a national character will be embodied in the music. Dvorák, Ravel, and many othershave felt free to borrow from the folksong literature of countries other thantheir own, frankly in the spirit of a tourist, so to speak, without forfeitingtheir own national identity. What is required if a truly national character isto be achieved is that the entire texture be impregnated with what we recognize as indigenous to the compiled material. This was not the case amongcomposers around 1900—composers who took as an example Dvorák's “New World” Symphony and compiled American folk tunes in a European symphonic setting. Joseph Horowitz, a specialist in American music of thatera, has recently taken issue with this view of the failure of those composers to mold a valid American idiom and has deplored our neglect ofthem, blaming Bernstein and Thomson as well as historians of Americanmusic for a delinquency in this affair.[4] It's true that Americans have shortmemories and that there were a few, very few, composers active around 1900 and in the earliest decades of the twentieth century who deserve moreattention now—though what native composers get the attention they deserve? I remember, however, during my Harvard days (the thirties) the composer Arthur Foote, for one, was quite a presence on the Boston scene;he and his contemporaries were performed, including George Whitefield Chadwick who died in 1931. So we had opportunity to judge their musicand many of us were impressed neither by its national character nor by the aesthetic quality of much of it.
Most of the time Harris did not literally quote folk sources (thoughthere are examples such as the variety of kitsch of 1941 for band, When Johnny Comes Marching Home). What he did, rather, was skillfully fashion
Ex. 2. Roy Harris, Third Symphony (opening)
Of all the numerous claims that have been made as to what constitutes the essential nature of American music surely the most penetrating is the one
Ex. 3. Aaron Copland, Variations for piano (opening)
If a certain manner of exploitation of rhythmic devices is to be taken as adistinguishing feature of American music, it is inevitable for us to assume that it must have a great deal to do with jazz, pop, and rock. Today thosegenres are just as much a part of the ambience in which a British youngster grows up as they are a part of that in which an American youngsterdoes. But it was not always so. There was a time when just the American environment was saturated with jazz or ragtime rhythm wherever youwent, and it left its imprint, as it does now, on every boy and girl whetherthey were fans or groupies or not. And if they grew up as composers thisexperience was bound to manifest itself, taking a form in their music quitedifferent from what Europeans like Milhaud and Stravinsky did with the genres in the twenties. For those composers used jazz as they might useany other folk music, preserving their own national identity while borrowing from another.
For the American composer the paradox is that the rhythmic complexities of jazz are likely to assume a guise in which their origin is no longer discernible, and the impression we have when we hear it is not one of jazzat all. The tricky rhythms of jazz, when rhythm is a matter of deep concernto one, can go through so many metamorphoses as to not inconceivablyend up with Elliott Carter's metrical modulation. Carter wrote a very insightful article on this subject, first published in the Score and I. M. A. Magazine back in 1955. It resurfaced in the recent collection of his writingsand like all of his pronouncements it is well worth attention.[6] Of special interest in terms of the present discussion is what he had to say about Roger Sessions and by implication himself. During the years when striving deliberately for an American style was all the rage, Carter and Sessions wereopenly hostile to the idea. They believed American composers are American because of who they are. Both of them were respected for a certain degree of weightiness and seriousness in music without any of the fashionable local color. It is a revelation to have attention drawn to the rhythmic intricacies that establish the American parentage of these two predominantly abstract masters. I think Walter Piston might be added to their number to make it a triumvirate, though Carter would probably find himwanting the complexity of Sessions's music and his own. This would not, Iam sure, affect his admiration for Piston.
It is ironic that it should have been a Brooklynite with none of the credentials of someone born on the western plains or in New England, a composer
A curious and amusing sidelight to this development is that the nearest the composer of Billy the Kid and Rodeo ever came to a cow was whenthe car he was driving ran into a heifer (or rather, the heifer ran into the car, probably attracted by the bright lights) outside of Tanglewood ona dark night. It happened I was in the car behind his. We were going to Copland's studio after a concert at the Berkshire Music Center for refreshments and our usual post mortem on the event we had just attended. Copland was talking animatedly and when he talked he drove slowly, so onecould scarcely say he was being reckless. Like good citizens we called the cops, and they interrogated him (and the rest of us) as if he had committedsome heinous crime. The local Berkshire inhabitants at that time (the mid-forties) were still resentful of Tanglewood for having intruded on their peaceful existence, so the Pittsfield papers made a big affair out of the delinquency of the head of the Berkshire Music Center. (The charge was “endangering lives and property….”)
Normally I tend to be skeptical of images of this variety that music canevoke by virtue of the unspecific nature of its emotional content. But Icould not help thinking of these two British music critics when I encountered the same theme in an old essay of Alfred Kazin's with the title “The Stillness of Light in August,” in which he refers to a “curious effect of immobility in Faulkner's characters as they run (as if they were held up in the air by wires).”[12] I was convinced that here there must be some shared American experience. Faulkner's characters are from the south and Copland's cowboy tunes are from the west. But though one may legitimatelyask whether in a country as vast and diversified as ours there is a pervasive American character, some traits could be nationwide.
What Copland proposed was not widely adopted by the most seriouscomposers as their American manner, its fate being rather its wide spread exploitation by so many hack, commercial composers of the day. But whathe accomplished did help establish a recognizable American profile somewhere
In any discourse on the American character in music the name of Charles Ives will figure prominently. Ives was very much involved in the Americanscene in a way that urban composers would not be. Yet like Carter and Sessions he did not believe in deliberately cultivating an American style sinceif one were an American it would take care of itself, provided, as he put itsomewhere, “the Yankee can reflect the fervency with which his gospelswere sung.” His own credentials as a purveyor of American tradition wereas strong as they come. He was much attached to his native New England, and of no little consequence was the fact that his father had been a member of a Civil War band. According to the psychoanalyst Stuart Feder, Iveswas uncommonly identified with his father.[13]
It is no surprise that Ives's music is larded with folksong includinghymns, patriotic anthems, marches, and the like. The second movement of the Fourth Symphony is teeming with examples, a veritable blockbuster, with “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” holding forth among many tunesmost of us do not know. And yet as I have become more familiar with the music I have been troubled by the sense that the infrastructure is essentially a traditional European one which has been fractured—in the orchestral works, symphonic European. What makes the music sound so modernistic and dissonant is the way elements not too original are pulled out ofshape, and if one takes a closeup of the music, as I like to do, the extraordinary atmosphere, the drama, the inspiration dissolve, and one becomesaware of a certain sheer disorder.
The earliest musicians to recognize Ives (according to Henry Cowell, hischief advocate, I may include myself among them)[14] were ecstatic and looked beyond his deficiencies. We excused him for his less than exemplary technique, his habit of not bothering to edit, polish, and otherwise put the final touches on a work because he knew it would not be played anyway. Also, there was the unfortunate circumstance that he had not enjoyed the opportunity of profiting from the feedback from critics, peers, and audiences
Cowell, who should receive most of the credit for the discovery of Ivesand his promotion, declared that the recognition dated from the first public concert in which his music was played, presented by an avantgarde New York organization called Pro Musica in 1927. This concert, Cowell recalledalmost three decades later, “was a milestone in the career of Ives's music because the two most influential American critics made a real attempt tounderstand the music.” The critics Cowell referred to were Olin Downesof the New York Times and Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune. Cowell described the attendance as “a sophisticated musical audience” and even though most of those present rejected the music violently, it was a notable occasion since it witnessed Ives's “coming out.”[15]
Copland had another idea of the decisive moment when he later took abackward look—a moment in which he himself played a decisive part. Hefastened his attention on an event that took place five years later. It seemsthere existed, modeled after the French “Six,” a Young Composers Group that Copland, as stated above, had brought together for the purpose ofmeeting fairly regularly to exchange ideas. I was a member of the groupbut my position was ambiguous since I was not composing at the time. Asa critic I was welcomed among them to do the kind of public relations that Paul Collaer had done for the Six. My fellow members were Henry Brant, Israel Citkowitz, Lehman Engel, Vivian Fine, Irwin Heilner, Bernard Herrmann, Jerome Moross, Elie Siegmeister and, for a while at the beginning, the expatriate Paul Bowles who was living at that time in Paris—a circumstance much resented since we were very pro-American.[16]
We decided all together to join Cowell in discovering and promoting Ives. Our enthusiasm for Ives, especially that of Herrmann, later of Hollywood fame for his scores for Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock films, wassuch that Copland could not refuse us when we approached him to includea work of Ives on a program of a prestigious festival of contemporary American music he was planning for the artist colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. He even agreed to play the piano part himself in agroup of songs that would represent Ives. The audience, made up mostly ofavantgarde composers, rose to the challenge of the music, especially the song “Charlie Rutledge” with its tone-cluster accompaniment and spokenvocal line.
In his recollections Copland remarked, “this was the first time a groupof professional musicians were paying serious attention to Ives. It was aturning point in the recognition of his music. Arthur Berger was propheticwhen he wrote in his review for the Daily Mirror:‘History is being madein our midst.’”[17] It is perfectly plausible that Copland was unaware of the 1927 concert or deliberately ignored it since the schism maintained between the more avantgarde composers and his (our) crowd was such that Cowell and his far-out experimentalists inhabited an entirely differentworld from ours. We were regarded as a bit Francophile and elite, whichwere precisely the locutions the extreme radicals (Cowell, Varese, Ruggles, etc., who wrote “ultramodern” music) were likely to apply to the League of Composers, the concertgiving organization “our crowd” had establishedin 1923 before I was part of it.
The last place one would look for a review of the Yaddo event is a Hearstscandal sheet, a tabloid like the old New York Daily Mirror, but I was ayouthful stringer for that paper, and I wrote up the festival, making the statement that Copland quoted: “History is being made in our midst.” Itwas also quoted by Cowell in his book on Ives.[18] Another of my earliestwritings about Ives appeared in 1934. It was something more substantialthan a music review for a tabloid paper; it was an article on the songs of Ivesfor a new music publication.[19] While I was a graduate student in music at Harvard University I was editing a publication called the Musical Mercury, published by Edwin F. Kalmus for the purpose of advertising the miniaturescores that he had started publishing on a grand scale.[20] (He had worked inthe copyright office and had learned that many valuable foreign twentieth-century scores were not protected.) Each issue had a score in the centerusually unrelated to the content. I took advantage of my access to a musical readership (limited though it was) to write about the 114 songs which Ives had published at his own expense in a bound volume. In my article, along with expressing certain reservations that I already had in those days, I wrote, “those who would call Ives the father of indigenous music wouldseem justified.” The title seems to have endured, except we say less pretentiously “American” music, without the implications “indigenous” mighthave in our multicultural society. But I am no longer sure it is apposite. One expects a father to beget offspring, but young composers for a longtime did not emulate Ives as they have, for example, emulated Copland. That may very well change. The young new Romanticists are likely to beattracted more to the Ives approach than to that of Copland. Anyone using
The education Ives could get at Yale when he attended—or anywhereelse in America—was, I assume, probably academic and mired in nineteenth-century Romanticism.[21] It had not changed much by the 1920s when young composers reacted against it by initiating a pilgrimage to Nadia Boulanger in France. Everything we know about Ives indicates that itwould be preposterous to envision him joining such a pilgrimage even ifhe were of the generation that made it. As I have said, though he did notbelieve in being deliberately American in music by artificially contriving devices to make you sound American, he did believe your music's being American was a virtue and that it will be as American as you are. But hewould still have been fearful something European might rub off on him ifhe had gone abroad to study. Boulanger, while well aware of la grandeligne, was adamant about the musician (creator or performer) having control over the tiniest detail. (I recall from my own studies with her justbefore World War II the shower of invectives she poured upon me when Iillustrated on the piano a point in our discussion with a passage from Wagner and got the wrong inversion of one chord—which did not seem to matter since it was not germane to the point I wanted to make. But I was subjected to a volley of abuse that I never forgot whenever I illustrated a pointagain.) Such attention to detail might have helped Ives clean up the surfaceof his music. On the other hand, it might have ruined him as we now knowhim. His music is the product of the spontaneous outpouring of highlycharged emotions at the expense of elegance of detail. Herein lies my ambivalence when it comes to making a final evaluation of Ives. However, heis certainly, I must admit, a figure who looms on the American music sceneand who provides an experience we do not get elsewhere. This should beenough to stamp the mark of immortality on his brow.
As a member of the Young Composers Group and a critic who wroteabout Ives's music, I was welcome to visit Ives as most of my cohorts did. That I did not do so, something I now regret, could be attributed to my concern over his reputation for getting very agitated if he were crossed in a discussion; owing to his ill health he would have to retire at once and go upstairs to bed. I was an argumentative young man and I was afraid my leftistpolitics would clash with his political orientation; also I might let slip a remark
Let me return to the matter of the quotation of folksong in composers like Ives before going on to other things. One of the main problems for someexacting listeners is the price a composer pays for leaning heavily on compiled folksong, which will obviously be a singable, memorable linear component. But this kind of writing tends to give up its secret more easily thanother, more dense writing. Much as I admire Stravinsky, as well as the inspiration and workmanship of his Petrushka, I tend not to be enthusiasticat the prospect of a rehearing of the work since I have it so thoroughly internalized by now. The same is true of my attitude toward certain folkishworks of Bartok or Copland, both of whom I consider highly admirable composers.
It cannot be stressed too much that ideally works of the fine arts are notconsumer products.[22] We might start to consume them but we never consume them completely as we do ordinary consumer products because wecan, and we want to, return to them again and again to discover new dimensions within them, things we had missed before. If this were moregenerally understood we might not have the inclination toward crossover concerts which have the often insurmountable problem of requiring us toshift gears in our listening, since they inevitably include compositions thatjuxtapose serious and pop music without properly synthesizing them, and we listen very differently to music we consume than we do to other music.(Note: It is not a question of one type of music being better than another.)
I am talking about prototypes, a matter of emphasis, since in real lifethe categories may not always be clean-cut at the borderline. Thus there are, to be sure, the inspired pop songs that endure—songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, or the Beatles. (I wonder how much nostalgia has to do with their durability.) Also, one might start out to writea catchy tune with the sole idea of having a hit and making money and still come out with a minor masterpiece. Inspiration is not something we knowhow to turn on and off, and it may show up in unexpected places. And I certainly would not deny that pop music (jazz, rock, etc.) has fed serious music
Where commercial pop music is concerned, the idea of immediacy is in both its conception and the aim for quick success. We remark on the productivity of Mozart tossing off work after work in an instant because it isin contrast to the practice of most serious composers who relish the composing process enough to dwell on it. They would no doubt expect that reciprocally their listeners dwell on it too—perhaps listening at first severaltimes before they grasp a given work.(I doubt whether the current marketers of pop songs anticipate such an audience response for their wares.) Copland and Stravinsky were once comparing notes on their composing practices, and they agreed that there was one thing they certainly had incommon: the slow pace that they preferred to maintain in the activity. Copland mentioned that it was not unlikely for him to do just one big work a year. “Yes,” said Stravinsky, adjusting the collar of his jacket in that familiar gesture to make it sit better around the neck, “I like to feel comfortablewith it.” On another occasion Copland was asked why he did not use opusnumbers. He responded by saying he did not think it necessary because, since he wrote about one work a year, putting the year of composition onthe score should be sufficient to indicate the place and order in which the work stood in his oeuvre.
When we consider the amount of time serious composers spend on awork it seems sacrilege to grant it the short life we usually grant a popsong. We need new pop songs all the time because the older ones arequickly consumed. That this is not the case with serious music makes for a fundamental difference. When Philip Glass was preparing a live performance of a soundtrack he had created fifteen years earlier for a movie that was being revived, he thought it might sound dated. But instead he was quite impressed that, at least to his own way of thinking, it retained its freshness all through what he considered a long time for any work. As I interpret his reaction, he was perfectly aware of having crossed the line intothe field of pop (and also was evidently satisfied with himself for having done so) where such things as going in and out of style in a brief period arean issue and where his music would be expected to go out of style in the same way as a popular song does. There are some works, like the three I
Obviously, there are elements other than those provided by folk music that define the American character, elements along the lines of the immobility that I have mentioned. But it is not too clear what they are. Bernard Holland of the Times, writing about what I consider the utterly Francophile music of Ned Rorem, observed, in a left-handed fashion, “If it is a duty to identify Mr. Rorem as an American composer, one can point to certain characteristics. First is the strain of puritanism in his spare, harsh linesand textures and next to it the paradox of openhearted melody in generous, long-breathing tunes.” (I have little doubt that if these two characteristics came to sparring with each other for supremacy, the “open hearted” melody would win out in Rorem's highly sensuous and expressive music.) Holland goes on to cite evidence of Protestant American part-singing and evensome bop chords. But I do not find it particularly convincing.[23]
There are, to be sure, some things, more concrete things, that serious American music has contributed to the whole world, though it would behard to identify them as American unless you knew their genealogy. I amthinking, for example, of Cowell's tone clusters. I am not aware that he ever copyrighted them but Bartók, in gentlemanly fashion, is said to have written to Cowell for permission before using them himself. In addition to tone clusters, in the same area there is the John Cage prepared piano—prepared with nuts, bolts, screws, and bits of rubber. Cage, of course, with his theories of “non-music” acquired a reputation in Europe and Asia wider thanany other American composer, with the possible exception of George Gersh win, has ever achieved. Finally there is minimalism, popularized by Philip Glass but early on practiced more effectively by Steve Reich, and perhaps also Terry Riley and La Monte Young. And as everyone knowswhen it is a matter of music it is not by its “serious” products that America is known abroad but by its jazz, rock, and so on. This, however, spoilsthe reception of serious music since we have been type cast as dispensers ofa form of entertainment music, and music more profound is not expectedof us. However that may be, the matter of music having an American castno longer has priority, as I have already indicated, because we have enteredan international stage and feel quite content with it. If achieving an American character assisted us in believing American music had “come ofage,” then our efforts have been quite sufficiently rewarded by the few manifestations I have mentioned. Mission accomplished. We need not push it anylonger. Let it take its own course.
3. Is Music in Decline?
The prophets of doom who see every innovation in music as a decline oreven a harbinger of the death of the art have a long history. Nicholas Slonimsky regaled us with numerous examples of their scurrilous attacks in his book A Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composerssince Beethoven's Time.[1] In the past century there has been a particular orientation that may be traced back many decades to British critics like Ernest Newman, who established a tradition that has strongly colored the opinions of some of the most influential American critics. What characterizest his tradition is a nostalgia for nineteenth-century Romanticism and a consequent rejection of the most significant twentieth-century music in one indiscriminate bolus. An attitude of this nature on the part of a music criticcan very well end up with a determination that it would have been better if no music had been written in the twentieth century rather than the kind that has been. Critics with such a view would have no use for W. H. Auden's sober admonishment that the critic “first and fore most…must be so fond of works of art that he would rather there were imperfect ones than none at all…”[2]
According to Samuel Lipman in Music after Modernism the mainstream performers refrain from playing twentieth-century music since they place their careers in jeopardy if they do: “A performer's career can no longer be advanced, but rather only harmed, by any association with new music.”[3] The chief New York Times critic emeritus Harold Schonberg almost a quarter of a century ago insisted that “the big names of yesteryear” had had sufficient exposure (“every orchestra played its share”), and that the public, having had “a chance to immerse itself, had decided against the music.”[4] I wonder how the public had a chance to “immerse” itself if performers with their eyes on the box office did not play the music. That
That was all yesterday. Today, according to Paul Griffiths of the Times, a percipient observer of avantgarde musical trends, “Things are changing. Several times already this season the New York Philharmonic has filled Avery Fisher Hall for programs consisting entirely or mostly of new music….”[5] Perhaps there is cause for optimism. But I cannot help thinking that part of the “improvement” is due to the more accessible music being written and another part to the fact that the big men of modern music have finally become icons. What of those who have had much to offer but never made it as big as your Stravinsky or Copland, names like Leon Kirchner, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, or Don Martino, to pick at random from myown circle without much calculation? Also, it occurs to me that in regard to the bounty of “new” music in New York in which Griffiths takes such pleasure, as he should, it may be legitimate to ask now that we have arrived at the twenty-first century whether some of the music included in his survey, music which dates from the first half of the twentieth century, properly belongs under the banner of the “contemporary.” Isn't it time for it to be considered part of the historical repertory? Isn't it time that when these worksare played the presenters cease to pride themselves on engaging in some altruistic act and satisfy themselves with the knowledge they are doing no more than what they should be doing?
The avatars of the decline theory employ immediate appeal as a criterion. Those of us who reject such a criterion of artistic excellence are usually accused of believing the contrary, namely, good art always goes unrecognizedin its time. Some people do believe this. At mid-century at the most avant-garde concerts some composers were known to have rigged boos and catcalls at premieres of their own music or those of their fellow avant-gardists. At the Donnaues chingen Music Days for Contemporary Tone-Art, theprogram organizers would be sure each year to include at least one work that would make a sensation—that is, at least one work that was so far out
It may not be accurate to say that a masterpiece is inevitably overlookedin its own day, but from time to time it is. Newman, in A Musical Critic's Holiday, went into various convolutions to deny this is ever true. His contention was that when works sound defective on first hearing they reallyare, and that a masterpiece will always be recognized at once. Moreover, if works are inaccessible when new they will always be so. To illustrate his claim he took the glorious slow introduction of Mozart's “Dissonance” Quartet, K. 465, and urged his readers to accept the preposterous conclusion that it is really a “rather dubious piece of writing” that “does not quitecome off.”[6] By this means he was attempting to exonerate Mozart's pedantic contemporary Giuseppe Sarti who, Newman insisted, was speaking for the audience of his day when he wrote that the quartet was the product of a mere “clavier player with a depraved (unsound, goaste in the Italian) ear.”[7] In particular the celebrated striking false relation between A-flat and Anatural in the second measure, quite shocking for its time, was singled outas a monstrosity, whereas many of us feel it is a most inspirational touch.
Among all the naysayers the American critic Henry Pleasants was, perhaps, the most extreme, announcing that not only was serious music in decline during the first part of the century but that the whole tradition cameto an end shortly after World War I. (His contention was that serious music had abdicated its place in the mainstream to pop music, which wouldhenceforth reign supreme.)[8] By far the most outspoken and articulate adherent of the claim that the hallowed old tradition had fallen into a state of desuetude was himself a composer: Constant Lambert of Britain, who see loquent tirade bears the snappy title Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. Published in 1934 when the adulation of Sibelius was gathering momentum for the big success the Finnish composer was to enjoy in the following decade, the book ends up, after castigating almost every composerof the time, with the declaration, “Of all contemporary music that of Sibelius seems to point forward most surely to the future.”[9]
Sibelius—along with Shostakovich, who was similarly celebrated for the perpetuation of the nineteenth-century Romantic symphonic approach—has lost ground since about the sixties. But the pro-Romantic propaganda seems to have had at least some effect, producing a handful of young composers who have rallied around George Rochberg and David Del Tredici
However that may be, the new Romanticists were soon overshadowed bythe minimalists, and the minimalists in turn seem to be losing ground among the young to what I find to be a nondescript manner either because I fail to comprehend it owing to the generation gap or because it needs timeto be seen in proper perspective. There was talk of something even newerdubbed “New Age” music, but I am not aware that it has much identity except that the consolidation of pop and serious is somehow involved and perhaps also multiculturalism. I sometimes fear I am becoming a naysayer myself when I contemplate the very latest developments. But there is fartoo much good music being written today by composers who are underground, and far too much great music written since the twenties to justify just writing it off.
The contentions of the naysayers are based, in America in particular, noton standards of quality applied to the major works composed in our century, but on a certain statistical assessment of audience preference. It is not difficult to comprehend your average listener's preference for Romantic music: the prevalence of program music with a story to engage one and help to get one's bearings while listening, the familiarity of the conventional and conservative idiom with which one has grown up, the strong, overt feelings that come at the listener so that minimum effort is required to get intimately involved with what is being presented. Perhaps too, forthose who half-listen, Romantic music, with its hill-and-dale progress, charting a path from one climax to the next, is the ideal vehicle for what George Santayana once referred to as that “drowsy revery relieved bynervous thrills.”[11] Audiences have made side trips from time to time, notable among them the honeymoon with Vivaldi, whose motoric continuity makes a contemporary listener, nurtured on the steady beat and eight-to-the-bar of jazz and pop, feel at home. But there is always the return to the territory of choice and I do not think we can change that. Certainly no one should try, no one should turn audiences against Romantic music if they like it that much. Just leave a little space for something else.
What I think would help matters is a greater awareness that there is not amonolithic audience. As a matter of fact there is even a public that not only is uninterested in the standard repertory that the mass concert audience holds to be so sacred but actively despises it. Montreal's Metro, for instance, was invaded not so long ago by youths described as “punks” wholoitered, chain-puffed cigarettes under “No Smoking” signs, and other wise made themselves obstreperous; and it was found that piping the familiaropera and symphonic repertory into the underground stations drove the intruders away. Also, among the variety of audiences not the least significant is the huge one for jazz and pop, which threatens to snuff out the audience for serious music entirely. I do not know how much we can take intoaccount idiosyncratic tastes, but they do exist. I once knew an excellent cook who told me she was bored when she repeated any recipe. Also, it was reported, though it may be apocryphal or exaggerated, that Liszt was alsobored when he had to play any piece a second time. How different audiences can be, moreover, was driven home to me in 1960 when my string quartet, my most serially organized work—music we in America still considered “modern” —was relegated to the category of “old-fashioned” twelve-tone music when it was played at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Cologne, in June 1960. Composers like Luigi Nono and the Cage adherents became the figures of the moment.
Unfortunately, however, young composers cannot choose their audienceor their particular performers, conductors, or concert organizations. It ismainly the listeners at the events of the major symphonies and opera companies—the conferrers of big reputation on any young person who happens to win the lottery as the token composer these organizations requireto maintain their prestige—who are in a position to terrify the novice, toensnare him or her in a situation in which there is a conflict of joy and agony: joy on the part of the creator in finally hearing what the symbols committed to paper sound like, agony from the hostile audience reaction, and perhaps also annoyances of one's own making, the almost inevitable miscalculations in scoring that are discovered when a neophyte's work isexposed for the first time to public scrutiny.
Composers can find a friendlier and more receptive environment forchamber music and solo works in the collectives established by themselves and their peers or at the recitals of performers who make the dissemination of contemporary music a point of honor. But it is a bit much to have one'sfirst or chestral (also operatic) efforts tried out under world-class auspices. In the big concert halls it is as if composers are in foreign and hostile territory. Having won what often amounts to a lottery—to get in the door, to
When I was at Harvard in the late thirties I recall walking, probably along the Charles, with Delmore Schwartz and passing on to him the news that a mutual friend, the composer David Diamond, was to have a work played by the Philharmonic. This was quite an event, an event of a kind that almost never happened in our circle, and in those days it had the glamorousfillip of a coast-to-coast live radio broadcast on Sunday afternoon directfrom Carnegie Hall. Delmore's response was to express proper pleasure forour friend but also to voice some envy that poets did not have the same opportunities as composers to display the hard-earned results of their creative efforts under the bright lights of a huge public arena. All the poets had were the readings in intimate venues and publication in the little magazines. (Having a single poem in a big commercial magazine was the nearest thing to it, but not at all the same.) For my part I could only feel envious of him and his fellow poets who could pursue their interests without having to answer to the unholy demands of that glamorous world.
Unfortunately it is difficult for composers to go underground (though some do) and simply disdain the public enterprises of the world in which they live just because they (or most of them) depend on certain facilities that world offers. Once there they must suffer the trials of having their achievements, very likely immature ones, as well as their mistakes exhibited
Almost any member of the audience about to buy a second hand car would surely have an expert examine it before putting money down. But where music is concerned listeners consider themselves expert enough. I wonder how much that circumstance is due to an over production of musicof all kinds that leads to its devaluation since people hear (notice I do notsay “listen to”) so much music wherever they go. At a fine restaurant, gentle Baroque or Classical music (Wagner would be bad for the digestionand mercifully modern music too) goes with the candles on the table to establish a proper atmosphere; snippets of traditional masterpieces occasionally insinuate themselves into TV commercials (frustrating when they aresuddenly cut off should you find yourself listening), and TV features, evenwhen presenting disasters, seem incapable of doing so without background music. Curiously enough, nobody seems to mind when tense situations inthe movies are accompanied by atonal music. (Some time ago for the TV series Dr. Marcus Welby the Hollywood composer Leonard Rosenmanwrote quite admirable music in a style similar to that of Berg.) But it'ssomething else when they have to listen to it.
As a result of all this ubiquity of music the audiences have a sense of being on such an intimate basis with it that they fancy themselves mavens. Admittedly, today's audience is better informed than the multitude in Mozart's day when serious music was the prerogative of the aristocracy, even though the emerging middle class was making demands to be provided with the opportunity of savoring the fine arts—a development thatled to the establishment of public concerts. But our mass audience is so newand different, so much vaster, that there is really no basis for comparison. Even educated musicians would not always feel themselves prepared to pass final judgment on a complex new work after a first hearing. But the hoi polloi that fill concert hall seats have no qualms in doing so.
Joseph Wood Krutch, who was an astute authority on mass culture, oncecited the old question, “Is the Good always the friend of the Best or is it some times and somehow its enemy?” and he asked, “Is Excellence more likely to win out to Mediocrity than it is to mere Ignorance or Nullity?”[12] Current audiences may be better informed than their counterparts of former
The public expects entertainment, and the Globe is reflecting that fact. Replicating the tactics of Cage without being aware of it, presentershave tried all sorts of gimmicks to liven up a concert, if only to have a performer go through some innocuous routine, like the singer who donned a
The importance of a composer appearing in person to the presentersof concerts was driven home to me when I had a performance of my Septet, a Koussevitzky Foundation commission, by the superb Contemporary Chamber Players under Arthur Weisberg. It was part of a concert in memory of the celebrated Boston conductor at the Library of Congress which houses the foundation. It was not a premiere, but because of the special nature of the occasion the sponsors wanted me to be present. So, accompanied by my wife Ellen, I made the trip from Boston to Washington, where friends of close relatives had offered to put us up. They insisted we stay fordinner and when I protested that serving dinner before a concert puts astrain on the hosts to finish up in time, they assured me there would be noproblem and the library was not far; a taxi would come and get us there inno time at all. (They themselves were not intending to go.) But they hadnot anticipated that taxis would be practically unavailable at the hour when theater-goers are on the march. They decided they would drive us overthemselves but what they also had not anticipated was that there were terrible tie-ups owing to construction of a subway. My piece was first and itwas some fifteen minutes long, just about the length of time we were late. As I walked down the long hallway to the area of the concert hall I noticed someone madly gesticulating. He evidently recognized me. He grabbed me unceremoniously and together we ran back stage where he pushed me ontothe platform. I was just in time to bow and go through the ritual: shake the conductor's hand, then the concert master's (kiss them if they happen to bewomen) and finally, wave to the players—though not necessarily in that
There can, of course, be occasions when the audience could not care less that a composer is in the hall to bow. Charles Munch gave the first Boston performances of my Ideas of Order in January 1964, a little over a decade after the New York Philharmonic had premiered it in Carnegie Hall. Nowadays when composers appear for a bow at Boston's Symphony Hallthey use a door right front from a box on the first tier. In those days composers had to use the middle aisle that the main (so-called orchestra) floorstill has only in the front part of the house. They had to walk down that aisle and reach the platform without mounting it, thus being in a position to shake the hands of the conductor and concertmaster who bothleant over so they could be reached. The Friday afternoon concert, second in the series of three or four weekly concerts, was characteristically attended by a Boston Brahmin audience that came and left in their chauffeurdriven limousines and were notorious for sitting on their hands except perhaps to contribute a small ovation to a world-class player, an aged one in particular.
When my piece ended and some pro forma applause commenced, the conductor Charles Munch summoned me to approach the foot of the platform. But to my embarrassment before I reached it the applause hadstopped. I wondered whether I should find a seat somewhere and disappearfrom the audience's line of vision. I went through with the pantomime, however, and was rewarded with some polite response.
It is pretty hopeless under current conditions, when even news has to be, in that unfortunate epithet, “infotainment,” to expect your average listeners to put down their cash without expecting to get immediate kicks, far from exhibiting the desired willingness to be patient for that higher pleasure that ultimate apprehension brings. The symphony and the operahave been pretty much co-opted by the mass media. The “fifty pieces” that Thomson has reminded us constitute the essential literature played overand over again have become mass media items—so familiar by now that they are practically transparent and present no challenge to the listener orthe players. Symphony-goers who pride themselves on their indulgence in “high culture” are likely to listen to Beethoven in the same abstracted waythey listen to pop (Santayana's “drowsy revery” again). It strikes the ear
Now and then an enterprising and courageous individual comes alongwho is in a position to do something about this bleak aspect of the American concert scene. Serge Koussevitzky's espousal of the American composer during his long tenure as Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor(1924–49) is legendary even though he did not conduct the most difficultand complex American composers. One of the things that made him sucha precious asset for American composers is that he made Boston his home, and when he spent summers in the Berkshires it was merely an extensionof Boston. In this way he kept in touch with what was going on creativelyin American music. Dimitri Mitropoulos did like wise in New York when hetook over the reins of the Philharmonic just at the time that Koussevitzky retired from the BSO. But Mitropoulos lacked Koussevitzky's personal forcefulness in the realm of musical politics not only when it came to facing criticism for playing new music but when it was simply a matter ofkeeping his job beyond his first decade. (See the discussion of both conductors in chapter 17.)
Leopold Stokowski, an icon like Koussevitzky, during his tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra was able to get away with reprimanding listeners who were hostile to the avant-garde music he presented. In 1929 in particular, that peripheral year of prosperity, he had no qualmsabout turning to the audience and urging those dissenting to music such as Schoenberg's to turn in their subscriptions so that others who were waiting to obtain them could sit in their seats—there being no difficulty at that still flourishing time in filling the house to capacity. More recently the Philharmonic has provided us with Pierre Boulez, who did new music butnot much of it American, and Leonard Bernstein, for whom contemporary American music was like the proverbial mother's milk but who, before long, preferred to display his conducting prowess in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Bernstein waged a virulent campaign against twelve tonemusic. In one of his excellent TV programs, part of a series that was generally quite well done and a remarkable source of music education for the young, he practically departed from reason and gave a very bad example tohis youthful listeners by saying before a performance of Pierrot Lunaire, “You better open that window in advance. Pierrot always makes me sickand needing to open the window.” (As almost everyone knows, for the college trade he had a more elaborate, dignified, quasi-scientific approach to
One of the chief grievances American composers have against conductors, as I have said, is that many of them never become part of the Americanscene in the way that Koussevitzky was a Bostonian and Mitropoulos a New Yorker. Most of them do their stint and go back to their homes acrossthe sea. They never give themselves any chance to know what local composers are up to. I was recently struck by the fact that this is an old complaint when I was reminded by the Americanist Judith Tick that in 1933 Iwas secretary of an organization called the Composers Protective Society, the main thrust of which was to issue a manifesto with a long list of grievances signed by some forty distinguished composers. (A letter in the Times, 4 June 1933, refers to it.) The grievances sounded very much like those we hear today, especially one that bemoaned “the familiar practice of conductors and virtuosi making up their season's repertory while abroad duringthe summer months.” As the son of a loved and loving Polish mother I donot think I can be accused of chauvinism, but when Carnegie Hall recently invited Maurizio Pollini, Pierre Boulez, and Daniel Barenboim to oversee asurvey of twentieth-century music I wondered why the foreign elementwas so strong among them. Not long ago we used to think of this as an old problem and that American performance had come into its own. I fear the European dependence is still rampant. (I wonder how much the prize for his String Quartet in an international Brussels contest was responsible fordrawing attention to Elliott Carter before he had anything like his currentfame in his homeland.)
The neglect of the American composer by the major symphonies was some what alleviated by the Louisville Orchestra's commissioning project, established by the mayor of Louisville in 1948 and subsidized much of the time by the Rocke feller Foundation. It was not an entirely professional orchestra, but by immersing itself in contemporary performance practice, working extra hard under its highly efficient conductor Robert Whitney, and scheduling far above the average number of rehearsals, the group madea valuable contribution as a noncommercial venture—not least of all withits LP recordings of many of the works presented in concert—until it became necessary for it to pay its own way, and that was the end of the newmusic project. (When I look back at a project like that one I tend to think things were better then, but I get a different impression if I view the whole picture.) Lately Michael Tilson Thomas has been stirring things up in San
Mitropoulos, as I have said, carried on the Koussevitzky tradition in New York when he assumed the conductorship of the Philharmonic in 1949 and brightened up New York concert life. The orchestra's sponsorship of new music had been previously pretty dismal. This fact is brought home tous by an article in the New York Herald Tribune on the Philharmonic programs for the season of 1945–46 that attempted to show that there hadbeen a “considerable” advance over the season exactly ten years earlierin the representation of American composers (slightly over 20 percent). When the tally is made of how many “American” works were includedin the season's repertory it looks good. But if one examines the statistics closely it turns out to be a pretty poor showing. The intent was to praisethe Philharmonic for its enterprising efforts on behalf of American music. The question to ask, however, is “what American music?” For there are the chestnuts, there is pop music, and there are the old works the presence of which on the programs is not particularly remarkable. The Philharmonic season included no less than five works of Gershwin, works of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Sousa, Copland's Lincoln Portrait again rather thanone of his challenging works (Appalachian Spring was also played but itcounted as a fresh choice since it was new at the time), American classics by John Alden Carpenter and Charles Martin Loeffler, and one or two otherworks that are debatable.
There is something in the nature of a Catch-22 in a state of affairs in which on the one hand it seems perfectly logical to assume that people have not developed a taste for new music because they do not have the opportunity
To assess the desolateness of the early landscape in this particular area it is necessary to bear in mind that in the thirties there was not the quantity of serious music that we now get on the radio from educational stations(even though lately there has been a marked curtailment). Moreover, there cording companies did not yet have the long-playing record which some years later would give them an incentive to seek out new names, since issuing and reissuing the same old “fifty pieces” would not be good business.
For a long time in the twenties and thirties, and even some of the forties, the important American composers were truly underground. Few people were aware that music of these composers could be heard at the concerts that Henry Cowell presented at the New School for Social Researchin New York, usually with the composer present to discuss it and answer questions. An audience of fifteen at any of these events was considered practically a crowd. They were not advertised and the main metropolitan newspapers neither mentioned them or reviewed them. The list of composers presented included such names as Copland, Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford, Wallingford Riegger, Dane Rudhyar, and also, though he was too ill to attend and participate himself, Charles Ives.
Another oasis on this desolate landscape was the limited number ofdance concerts of Martha Graham, whose enterprising and discriminating choice of composers for music accompanying her dance pieces endowed any of her programs with the character of an avant-garde concert of American music. Copland's seminal Piano Variations had some of its first hearings asthe musical score for her solo Dithyrambic even before the composer hadconsigned it to manuscript paper in its final form. In much the same waylater it was at the New York City Ballet that New Yorkers could hear the neoclassic masterpieces of Stravinsky as accompaniment to George Balan-chine's splendid ballets—choreographic masterpieces which could scarcelybe more successful in their synergistic grasp of whatever it was that Stravinsky aimed to convey. In the forties Stravinsky masterpieces could beheard almost nowhere else. The press on the whole was extremely hostileto this neoclassic phase of Stravinsky, blatantly favoring Sibelius and Shostakovich over it, although Virgil Thomson and, if I may be permitted, I myself, and for a brief period Paul Bowles before me, raised our lonely
4. Rendezvous with Apollo
Form Is Feeling
What some of us who have been avid listeners of Stravinsky have alwaysheard as being most significant in his works composed between approximately 1920 and 1955 are not his references to older music but rather the subtlety, ingenuity, and inventiveness of every aspect of composition. The subject is not the compiled Classical material, but what is done to it.(Specifics on this later.) I would not want to give the impression that I believe the Classical allusions vanish with this approach and are not apprehended as such—not only Classical, but Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, and so on. In the final product their treatment by Stravinsky renders a result that occupies a position as far as possible from pastiche. The originality is palpable in the extreme. As Copland once observed, “…if you don'tlisten closely, there are times when you might mistake Mozart for Haydn, or Bach for Handel, or even Ravel for Debussy. I cannot ever remember being fooled by the music of Stravinsky.”[1] It is odd that over the years somany listeners as well as the critics (the listeners coached by the critics?) focused above all on the music's references to Bach or any other old masteras if that were the essential content. They found it altogether unnatural that the extremely avant-garde composer of the orgiastic Le sacre du printemps(Rite of Spring) completed in 1913 could have traveled in so few years tothe chaste ambience of, for instance, Apollon musagete (1927), and they made it perfectly clear that they were unwilling to make the trip with him. It is one of the unfortunate quirks of history that so great a part of Stravin sky's oeuvre should have been saddled with a label like “neoclassicism” that does it so much injustice. Schoenberg seems to have been the victim of a comparable injustice because of the locution “atonality” whichhe disapproved of, since it suggested “against tone,” though it does not affect
It does not look as if things are going to change in the foreseeable futureas far as the labels for different trends are concerned, so we have to live withthem because calling a movement something else when one designation isso deeply imprinted on the minds of so many people is, it seems to me, cumbersome. The best we can do is apply first aid and try to do some damage control. Meanwhile, if we find we have to have recourse to the term—and I should find it hard to avoid this particular one—my advice wouldbe to use it in the broadest of senses. I recommend special vigilance whereone believes one has espied a case of neoclassicism but on closer inspection it turns out to be an excursion to an old style in the spirit of a vacationtrip from which one will soon return. I have in mind arrangements, amongother things. For example, Busoni's and Schoenberg's arrangements of Bach do not make their perpetrators neoclassicists in any sense. Even Stravinsky's adaptation of Pergolesi in Pulcinella is not yet a neoclassic Stravinsky, as I have observed before on more than one occasion.[3] (I was interestedto see that the Stravinsky authority Richard Taruskin felt the same way.)[4] Stravinsky's treatment of the borrowed Pergolesi tunes is not very different from his treatment of folk tunes in Petrushka, though I should be willing to admit that dealing with the Baroque composer's music may very wellhave fanned the flames of a desire to use works of the past as raw materialinstead of folksongs in the future.
Stravinsky in later life confided to Milton Babbitt how he felt about there criminations leveled against him to the effect that he was unnaturally “returning to” the past (the Schoenberg work Stravinsky refers to is Three Satires, Op. 28, dated 1925, for chorus, in which some of Schoenberg's ownwords made fun of composers who were aiming at a “return to …”):
Stravinsky told me how deeply disappointed and hurt he had been that Schoenberg had chosen (that was precisely his word: “chosen”) to takethe slogans of “back to Bach” and “neoclassicism” seriously, so seriously as to respond with an acerbic verbal satire, with music to match. For, to Stravinsky, “back to Bach,” was just that, an alliteratively catchy
To take Stravinsky literally in this reported conversation would obligeone to forswear both the evocation of the concept and the application of the rubric “neoclassicism” to his music and put it to rest as a sort of Madison Avenue slogan that had served its purpose. It must have been out of pique that Stravinsky disowned it in later life, and who can blame him when itdistracted people from what is essential in his music? But as I said above, Ithink it best that we try to live with it. At one point it seems to have served Stravinsky. (See the manifesto re Classicism below.) It can still be useful indealing with his music if one is circumspect and if one does not lose sightof the fact that Stravinsky does not identify himself with the sources thathe draws upon in his music but keeps his distance or, as he sometimes usedto say, uses them as the subject of his “criticism.”
In this rare instance of his unburdening himself on the subject as part ofa dialogue with Babbitt, however, Stravinsky seemed intent upon obliterating the whole concept from his past, and he was indeed free with facts tohelp him do so. For the blurred memory of an old man was playing trickson him if what he remembered was the alliterative slogan hurled at him bythe French musical public—a slogan he curiously remembered as beinghurled at him by Frenchmen in English! We should be charitable and nottake this little slip as something to make us lose sight of the essential burden of his confession which is not at all affected by it: namely, that at the point in his life when he recalled this affair he was thoroughly disabused of the concept neoclassicism and wanted to shift the blame to others for identifying him with it.
What I often find more disturbing than the recriminations leveled at Stravinsky for his backward look, his unnatural “return” to the past, arethe frequent allegations that his music is devoid of feeling. These allegations have often materialized as a corollary to complaints about his retrogressive stance but they have then assumed major proportions. One wouldthink that by now the matter was settled and that Stravinsky was no longerregarded as a paradigm of music without feeling. Only a few years ago, however, I came across a review in the New York Times that contained the following observation: “Using a mildly astringent language reminiscent of
Consistent with the Romantic thesis of music as self-expression (what John Dewey called, in its most unfortunate manifestations, a “spewingforth”)[7] is the notion that composers in the music they write must not express any feelings but their own, as if emotions experienced by others cannot burn as intensely in their music as emotions they experience themselves. (If this were true, how would novelists be able to deal properly withcharacters that are hateful or in any way alien to themselves?) When music or a style is being appropriated, the feelings expressed originally are obviously the feelings of other people, and the argument is that they havesomehow been wrung out in the process of being transmitted. In additionto this, mere mention of “Classical” is enough to prepare some of the listening public for basalt frigidity as the polar opposite of the hot intensityof Romanticism.
I wonder if it would not be a good idea to reserve the rubrics Classicaland Romantic to apply to the artwork rather than to the artist, who may bedifferent things at different times. I remember how surprised I was at a remark made to me some time in the forties by Paul Hindemith whom weall had pegged as a staunch neoclassicist. I was emerging from the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway at Thirty-ninth Street where I hadbeen listening to Siegfried in order to review it for the New York Herald Tribune. (Hindemith remembered me from having met me a few years earlier in Cologne at an International Society for Contemporary Music festival which included my String Quartet among its offerings.) After greetingshe told me, “that is an opera I would like to have written myself.” Sincethis chance encounter I have learned that he adored Wagner and that in the last scene of his opera Mathis der Maler, whether consciously or not, hequoted Tristan.
On the subject of feeling in Stravinsky's music, no one has been more culpable of contributing to confusion and misunderstanding than he himselfby virtue of the notorious, thoroughly indiscreet statement that appearedback in 1935 in his autobiography (Chroniques de ma vie, in the original French)—a statement that would seem to corroborate the public's assessment of his attitude toward expression in music:
Car je considere la musique, par sonessence, impuissante a exprimer quoi que ce soil: un sentiment, une attitude, un etat psychologique, un
I was enormously relieved when he explained himself many years later—or as some may prefer to put it, reversed himself—in one of the books ofconversation with Robert Craft:
That overpublicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is suprapersonal and superreal and assuch beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimedagainst the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcend entalidea “expressed in terms of” music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer'sfeelings and his notation. It was off hand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupidest critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statementabout musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, thoughtoday I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.[9]
Stravinsky was obviously attempting to deal with the tricky phenomenon that music is essentially nonverbal, and he was warning listeners whoare rendered uncomfortable by this phenomenon, listeners who will usewords nonetheless, that they should beware of reifying them so that they appear to have more import than they can possibly have. The best part ofhis more recent statement is the warning against “exact correlatives…between a composer's feelings and notation.” The phrase “beyond verbalmeanings” has to do with the conviction that the music cannot be “reproduced” in words or even an analytical diagram. (See the quotation from Arnold Isenberg in chapter 14.) But words and diagrams observing properlimits can be enormously helpful. Listeners who regard music as inviolateand ineffable are as commonplace as those who always see pictures and hear stories, and I would not want the reader to think I am endorsing either type. As to the first type their view quite justifies their listening inwhat Santayana called a “drowsy revery.” They are not interested in taking the music apart for better understanding. They welcome the prospectof merely being lulled by the billows of sound.
Stravinsky's original statement on the subject of expression had donethe damage, and it is doubtful anything he would have said afterward couldhave been accepted as sufficient reparation. The conclusion that may bedrawn from his disclaimer is that composers who may insist they are writing
Composers may evoke emotions without knowing what they are and without being aware they are doing so. Tones themselves are, to start with, emotionally toned. A high, loud sound has its aura of excitement, howeverlimited or diluted that may be under certain conditions. A high piercinglaugh does not represent glee by convention; there is an intrinsic relation, what some psychologists have called a functional relation, between the laugh and the quality of our exultation (a relationship of the kind that anonomatopoeic word has to its object). At the same time, the scream's meaning is not specific. Indeed, embedded in laughter at a distance it may be mistaken for a sign of distress. A composer's choice of a high sound to completea formal pattern involves an accompanying, probably unconscious, approval of the feeling that comes in its wake. It is a feeling, moreover, thatis not a mere matter of association like the relation of most words to their object. If the listener can resist assimilating the sound to anything obviousin the outside world, its function and meaning will be precisely what they are by virtue of its place within the music's structure.
It is true that Stravinsky and his or bit of composers reacted against the role that emotion played in nineteenth-century Romanticism, but to label them neoclassicists on this account is to assume a composer has no other choicebut to be either Classic or Romantic. There are, however, certain traits thatwe associate with the one or the other, and a composer may exhibit them without being altogether either Classical or Romantic. I have already mentioned self-expression as one objective of Romanticism and now I shouldlike to expand that to include expression of any kind when it is an objective that takes priority over form. (The neoclassicist's preoccupation with form,
The reclassification of Chopin as a Classicist would no doubt be considered a means of downgrading him by many observers. The mere effusionof better and more feelings is supposed to be superior to perfection of constructive values. Anyone who took piano lessons in the twenties was notunlikely to have been saddled with the kitschy salon pieces of a Britishcomposer named Cyril Scott and perhaps exposed to his theories as well, which included the notion that “Beethoven with his pomp and splendor surpassed the tinkling dulcitude of Mozart.” Tinkling dulcitude, indeed! A few of us are old enough to remember when Mozart was considered lightweight somewhat in the manner that Stravinsky is still considered bysome listeners (and critics, as I mentioned) to have written music devoid offeeling.
This notion of the essential Stravinsky has many adherents, and it goesalong with a common view of a reduced role of emotion in Classicism. The Romantic composer is credited by some observers with expressing not onlymore feelings but better ones—the loftiest, the most godlike sentiments: “le sérieux á tout prix” (seriousness at any price) in Darius Milhaud'schoice phrase. Unhampered by the straitjacket of the requirements of form, composers were presumably free to express themselves. Indeed all composers, observed Ferruccio Busoni, “have drawn nearest the true nature ofmusic in preparatory and intermediary passages (preludes and transitions) where they felt at liberty to disregard symmetrical proportions and unconsciously drew free breath.” He went on to asseverate that the rest or/er-mata “most nearly approaches the essential nature of art.” (Little did heknow that someday one John Cage would put into action what were presumably his hyperbolic musings.)[11]
The Romanticists took the high points as a norm, and they could evenfind them in music of the Classical period—the almost Wagnerian statue
Classical composers felt that emotion did not always have to be at greatheights or depths to be vivid and meaningful. Moreover they realized the potentiality of form to embody and unify contrasting emotions. The composer's primary concern was to bring to bear the appropriate technical requirements for their proper expression—not as two different things, forthey were aware of them as two aspects of the same thing. This is quite different from assuming the formal aspects are but a bridge to the feelings—a kind of Achilles heel one has to put up with. When the conscious mindis engaged mainly in arranging tones in suitable and striking configurations, the feelings that inform them are likely to spring from deep sourcesthe subtle ramifications of which would be far too elusive to grasp in anyother way. Yet, by the notes chosen, even under the strictest formal constraints, these deep, sequestered feelings become somehow accessible. Likethe portrait painter who relies too much on his model, the composer in hisdesire to reproduce emotion faithfully may remain too wedded to a conscious level, leaving little room for chance (what Stravinsky called the trouvaille—literally “find” or “discovery”) in handling the musical elementsand for adventures into hitherto untapped recesses of the unconscious.
An effort, a struggle to conform to a stringent structural requirement maybe apprehended as emotional tension. An excellent example is the dialecticplay in Mozart which may have its origin in what may sound like a colorless and mechanical pursuit: the composer's determination to maintain the hegemony of the tonic against the forces that seek to undermine it. The problem can arise in functional tonality out of the phenomenon that in the major scale the chord on I (the tonic) is to IV (subdominant) as V (dominant) is to I because of the intervallic equivalence of the two tetrachordsof the major scale (C to F and G to C). Thus, the tonic has the potentialityto sound like V of IV, there by losing its priority. One way to avoid this isto use V of II (supertonic) to deny and then replace V of IV, and II itself todeny and replace IV (an expanded version of deceptive cadence). To understand
I shall use portions of the Allegro, following the slow introduction, of Mozart's “Dissonance” Quartet in C major, K. 465, to illustrate the exploitation of this property of the major scale, but there are many other examples in Classical literature.
As the Allegro begins (Ex. 4a) it is significant that Mozart's first changeof harmony in the second bar over a C pedal is IV. In bar 28 a suggestion of(incomplete) V of IV occurs briefly as a passing-tone event, followed by there mediating V of II to prevent a resolution on IV Starting in bar 35 forthree bars, IV insists on being tonicized, only to be frustrated by the inevitable V of II. Note how V of IV makes two attempts (bars 36–37) toreach its goal before it is turned back. Note also the expressivity that comesin the wake of the reluctant return to C major in bars 38 and 39. Reluctantis also the epithet that can be more generally applied to the sense we get ofbeing repeatedly turned back in the course of the movement from attaining the triumphant F major that seemed on the verge of being tonicized. The crucial element is V of II, and once the reentry is negotiated there ismore than one way of proceeding. If you wish to compare the various occurrences, note that the one starting with bar 60, being in the second group, in conformance with the specifications of the sonata allegro formula, will
Ex. 4a. Mozart, “Dissonance” Quartet, K. 465, Allegro (opening of exposition)
The slow movement, Andante, entering in F major, satisfies all the unfulfilled drives toward the subdominant and accordingly conveys a sense ofarrival, of peace (Ex. 5). It has been pointed out to me by a musicologist thatthere is nothing special about the slow movement of a sonata form of the Classical period being in the subdominant, since it was a convention and therefore one would expect it. I do not claim that Mozart created the structural device of a subdominant second movement as an element of surpriseor special satisfaction, but rather, that once the convention was in place heseems to have taken advantage of the arrival of the conventional subdominant as the movement's tonic to make it meaningful by injecting a struggleto get to it. (It is an interesting example of the difference between the approach of the musicologist and that of the composer-theorist.)
When I consider the C-minor fugal exposition that opens the second partof Stravinsky's Symphonie de psaulmes (Symphony of Psalms) of 1930 Icannot help thinking that the arrival of C minor, in a very general way, hasan impact that is roughly analogous to that of the arrival of F major in the Mozart Andante, as we shall see. It is the kind of analogy I should expect-latter-day positivist theorists to regard as otiose. But if we are willing to allow some latitude in our thinking, and are willing to recognize similitude without always insisting on equivalence, we may find that it is Stravinsky'sapplication of a similar structural device in purely modern terms that placeshim in a certain limited debt to Classical tradition much more meaningfully than his familiar practice of appropriating or alluding to the characteristic configurations of the eighteenth-century Classical composers. Butlet me have him explain it to you in his own words. The following appearedin a one-time British magazine The Dominant in 1927, a translation of astatement published earlier in France under the caption “Avertissement” (Warning):
Ex. 4b. Same, Allegro (opening of development)
Ex. 5. Same, Andante Cantabile (opening)
There is much talk nowadays of a reversion to Classicism, and worksbelieved to have been composed under the influence of so-called Classical models are labeled neoclassic. …I fear that the bulk of the public, and also the critics, are content with recording superficial impressions created by the use of certain materials which were current in so-called-Classical music. The use of such devices is insufficient to constitute the real neoclassicism, for Classicism itself was characterized not in the least by its technical processes, which, then as now, were themselves subject to modification from period to period, but rather by its constructive values.[12]
What Stravinsky appears to have been telling us is that to be a neoclassic composer is not simply to parrot the eighteenth-century Classicists butto apply structural principles in composing—that is, modern structural principles that would serve some of the same purposes as the principles in Classical music. The first of the three parts of Psalms employs strategies intheir own way analogous to those in the Mozart quartet in the matter ofdelayed and frustrated resolutions within a context that may no longer belegitimately defined as functionally tonal. Instead, the pitch relations, the “tonal” areas, are moderated by an infusion of the octatonic scale that Stravinsky favored, especially in his “Russian” works and in only some of the neoclassic ones. The octatonic is a scale in which the adjacencies aredefined by two intervals in alternation: whole-tone and semitone. As a consequence, in contrast to the diatonic, which has seven forms (interval orderings) of the scale, there are only two forms: one starting with the whole-tone and the other (relevant here to the first part of the Psalms) starting with the semitone. In chapter 15, which treats the scale more fully,
Ex. 6. Referential octatonic scale, Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms, part 1
If E is the tone center (has pitch priority) the first note of each conjuncttrichord is capable of being its clone by virtue of its parallel position. Within the octatonic ordering of the pitch collection in Psalms Stravinsky exploits only two of the four available pitch priorities: E and G, and he isthus closer to Mozart than if he had exploited all four. In the loose analogy with the Mozart I wish to propose, the E stratum (to borrow Edward Cone's nomenclature)[13] corresponds to Mozart's tonic and tends to be Phrygian when it is not octatonic, while the G stratum, which is rather unruly, tends, without departing from the octatonic collection, to take the form of the dominant (V) of C. Whenever a resolution to C seems imminent, the E stratum interrupts it, somewhat in the way that the deceptive IIin Mozart keeps us from resolving on IV. The irony is that the form of the octatonic scale used here has a C-sharp which is a direct contradiction to the-C-natural toward which we are striving. So as long as the present form of octatonic scale is in operation (no “accidentals” or departure from the “key” being employed) there can be no resolution on C. The opening C of the oboe in the fugato of the second section is quite enough for us to experience a sense of a long-awaited resolution, somewhat the way, thoughmore intensely, that we experienced the sensation of the F-major opening
Ex. 7a. Stravinsky, Psalms, part i, revised 1948 (piano reduction by Soulima Stravinsky) (opening)
The main point is that the thwarted tendency toward C in Stravinsky isachieved by very different means from the thwarted tendency toward F in Mozart, but there is an underlying principle that they share. The main participants in the dialectical play as Stravinsky conceived it are briefly announced at the opening: an E-minor triad, transformed by virtue of spacing and doubling to sound like no E-minor triad ever heard before, sufficesto represent the E stratum. (The extraordinary spacing is not merely forcolor but has the structural function of placing the secondary pitch priority G in relief.) This is followed immediately by octatonic woodwind figurations hovering about a dominant seventh chord on G in first inversion(Ex. ja). The woodwind passage returns twice more, each time longer than it was before and followed each time by the opening E chord that thwartsit, bringing to my mind the scene in Gluck's Orfeo where Orpheus pleadswith the shades to admit him into the underworld and they respond repeatedly with a peremptory “No.” Finally the E prevails and there is brieflya Phrygian passage that gradually merges into the earlier figuration, ornamenting the G seventh chord. Just before the entrance of the chorus weseem ready for a resolution on C. The chorus, however, enters on E and wefind ourselves back in the earlier octatonic zone, the effect of not gettingthe anticipated C provoking, as I experience it, something like the sensationof losing one's step (Ex. jb). A more compelling approach to C occurs overeight bars from rehearsal Nos. 5 to 7. There is an extended dominant of Cin the chorus for four bars, followed by the incomplete V7 over a C-pedalin four flutes and an oboe which is quoted in Example 70, the entire passageproviding an occasion for one of Stravinsky's most striking ironies. Herewithin easy reach are the conditions for the establishment of the goal of
Ex. 7b. Same, part i (from second bar after No. 3)
Ex. 7c. Same, part i, No.6
With regard to what his critics and Stravinsky himself have had to sayabout the absence of feeling in his music, there can be no more eloquent disclaimer than parts i and 2 of Psalms. Thus, on some level—it was undoubtedly unconscious—Stravinsky felt there must be an element of affinity between the sense of pleading for C minor and individuals beseeching God to lend them his ear: “Exaudi orationem meam, Domini…” (Hearmy prayer, Lord). And also, in part 2, something loosely parallel to the satisfaction of arrival at the thwarted C minor in the words “Expectans expect-avi DOMINUM, et intend it mihi…” (Waiting for the Lord, he reachedout to me). Notions like this sound naive—another reminder of how powerless words are for dealing with music. I beg the reader to take them inthe broadest metaphorical sense. I have recourse to them occasionally simply to make a point. They would sound equally naive were we dealing withany of the other arts, even poetry where words are the medium. Wallace Stevens in one of his letters, after explaining some points in his poem “Sunday Morning”, observed, “Now these ideas are not bad in a poem. Butthey are a frightful bore when converted as above.”[14]
What often leads to the conclusion that emotions are absent where music ideally fulfills its structural essence is the difficulty of localizing them with respect to our normal connotative methods of thought, as I have attempted to do. Yet the emotions are nonetheless specific. If there can be somuch ambiguity in poetry, where the verbal symbols so closely representtheir objects (think of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity)[15] wemust expect music to allow for still broader interpretation. In much Romantic and Impressionist music there may be less room for disagreementover the emotion embodied in a given musical passage. But in more abstract works the whole unconscious is given free play. If the emotion seemsambiguous, seems to elude us when we try to encapsulate it, it is not because it is in itself ambiguous or elusive. The emotion expressed, as I havesaid, is perfectly specific. If we lean too heavily on verbal characterization
Ex. 8a. Psalms, part i concluded (final cadence)
Ex. 8b. Same, part 2, fugato (opening)
5. Reinventing the Past
Pastiche,
Collage, or “Criticism”?
The seeds of simplification as a reaction against the growing density of Romantic and early modern music were beginning to sprout at the dawn of the twentieth century at about the same time that a new complexity wasgathering momentum in the early music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Erik Satie's achievement of a pared-down texture that gave him the undeserved reputation of being trivial dated back as far as the eighteen-eighties, the time during which he wrote the familiar Gymnopedies. It was well inplace when the two twentieth-century giants started out with what was regarded as their blasphemous modernism. Stravinsky's later neoclassicism, such as it was, may be regarded as part of a trend that originated with Satie—a second wave, perhaps—precipitated in Stravinsky's case as a reaction to his own complexity in the Rite and anticipated by the international character of Histoire du soldat (Soldier's Tale, 1918) with its dancenumbers in the manner of a Baroque suite.
It was a similar incentive, the quest for a less rigorous alternative to the lucubrations postulated under the growing influence of serialism, that ledmuch later to the formation of a group of young American composers asdedicated to Stravinsky in his then current mode as the young American serialists were to the twelve-tone Schoenberg. This took place just about atthe start of World War II, its headquarters being Harvard University withwhich I still had contact since I was working on a dissertation that I neverfinished.[1] 1 would call myself a charter member of the group, but as in the case of the French Six, we never thought of ourselves as a formal group until we were called one. We had no name but we were variously referred toas “The New Boston Classical School,” “The Harvard Neoclassicists,” orsimply, “New England School.”[2]
The Harvard composers who were in at the beginning of the “school,”
But this originality of middle-period Stravinsky was completely invisible to members of the press, whose typical response was to complain aboutthe utter lack of personal style and integrity and to bemoan how the disparate sources on which he drew resulted in total incoherence. Yet the verysame reviewers who complained about the lack of style in Stravinsky lostno time in castigating us, the young Harvard Stravinskians, for the slightest trace in our music of the influence of the master's middle manner. I havenever had a more flattering review than the intentionally unflattering onewritten by a Boston newspaper man who observed in a parenthetical aside, “if Mr. Berger's name were not attached one might easily guess it to be oneof that author's [Stravinsky's] smaller ballet scores.”[4] How does one reconcile the claim that middle Stravinsky has no individuality with an observation I quoted above, made by a listener whose musical judgment mustsurely be respected? I refer to Copland's saying he had “never been fooledby the music of Stravinsky.” And how could Stravinsky's influence as aneoclassicist be so palpable if he lacked any style of his own?
Neoclassicism in whatever field of the arts has long had a bad press, itsproducts treated as hand-me-downs, not even as acceptable as something recycled. In an exchange on the subject of The Picasso Papers by Rosalind Krauss, Harvard University's Harry A. Cooper, Associate Curator of Modern
The breach between those of our persuasion (i.e., the Stravinsky camp) and the serialists has been exaggerated. It was and still is the kind of issuein which the press delights. Indeed, as recently as 3 August 1997 an articleunder the by-line of the late K. Robert Schwartz appeared in the New York Times with the headline, “In Contemporary Music, a House Still Divided,” which dug up the old controversy and attempted to get more mileage outof it. The friction that did exist between the young Stravinskians and serialists was scarcely judicious, since we were all accomplices on trial beforethe public for the same offense and in unity there might have been somestrength. The antagonism between the two groups was trivial compared tothe public's antagonism toward both. Nevertheless, the serialists tended tobe condescending. They considered themselves the intellectuals, and wewere a bunch of opportunistic composers pandering to public taste.
It is still believed in some quarters that the neoclassic music's admittedly greater accessibility was what must have fueled the movement. On the contrary, what much of the public saw in middle-period Stravinsky was a grossmishandling of their favorite older masters. They would rather, for example, have had their Bach untouched. If audiences had had it in their power, I used to think, they would have followed the example of the Boston police who marched into Symphony Hall in 1944 and enjoined a performance of Stravinsky's arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner” which was about to be repeated under his baton at the second of the weekend concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, offered in conformancewith a wartime directive that the anthem be played at the start of everyconcert. It seems that according to a Massachusetts law any “tampering”
At one time, in order to counter cries of how unnatural it was to “turnback,” I thought it important to demonstrate the logic of Stravinsky's abandonment of his “Russian” period style and to make it perfectly clear thatthe merit of a given work was not established by the degree to which it conformed to some foregone requirement of what historical progress should ormust objectively be.[9] This was not difficult to do. We live at a time wheninterest in the music of the past far exceeds interest in music of the present. This interest has brought an enormous amount of old music to light inscholarly critical editions that make every effort to transmit it in authenticform, in contrast to nineteenth-century musicians (Busoni, for instance) who prided themselves on making Bach sound like Brahms.
There is no reason why an artist should be expected to develop logically, no reason at all why he should need a passport to enter any terrain thatbeckons him, no reason why he cannot change direction in midstream. Butin the thirties the social dialecticians who cautioned us against Schoenberg's lucubrations also considered Stravinsky's new approach, as one leftist commentator put it, a sad casualty of the “prepotency of bourgeoisforces” —a high-flown phrase that has stayed with me for over half a century though I do not know where I read or heard it. In donning the cloakof internationalism, Stravinsky, it was alleged, had deliberately detachedhimself from his native land as if he were embarrassed by its political situation, there by cutting himself off from the sources that were at the root ofhis inspiration.
The assimilation of artistic to political ideologies in the thirties was not exclusively a phenomenon of Communism as it was in the case of the Seegers
I find this idea of musical fascism as unconvincing as the motivations the Communists ascribed to Stravinsky. It is all out of a desperation to explain Stravinsky's direction on the part of those who find it absolutely beyondtheir comprehension. Suppose it were something as insignificant as Serge Diaghilev's request for a ballet score based on Pergolesi that kindled Stravinsky's interest in utilizing the music of the past in some way, much as Robert Craft is said, by introducing him to the literature of serialism, to beresponsible for the composer's conversion to twelve-tone method. Would itrender the evolution any less viable? Many motives have been suggestedas having precipitated Stravinsky's neoclassicism and among them noneare more ingenious than those proposed by that formidable scholar of his “Russian” period, Richard Taruskin, brilliant historian though he admittedly is, who has made a career out of deconstructing the neoclassic Stravinsky, thus giving further credence, as if any were needed, to the average listener's notion that the composer's progress was all downhill from theend of the “Russian” period.[11] Taruskin quotes the French critic Jacques Riviere who wrote of the Rite at the time of its premiere that it was in reality “absolutely pure …no veils and no poetic sweeteners; not a trace ofatmosphere… everything is crisp, intact, clear, and crude.” And more, “Never have we heard a music so magnificently limited.”[12] This prompted Taruskin to observe, “One is tempted at this point to say that by hailing Stravinsky as an 'anti-Debussyste' and a Classicist in The Rite, Riviere ineffect turned him into one.”[13] On another front Taruskin argues, “So farfrom an investment in the 'German stem,' the 'retour á Bach' was an attempt to hijack the Father [an allusion to the once fashionable literary
The French neo-Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain in his seminalbook on aesthetics Art et Scolastique (Art and Scholasticism) which hestarted to write in 1918 (a few years after the Rite came out) coupled Stravinsky with Wagner among composers whose music would “debauch the ear.” But when he did the second edition Maritain evidently came aroundto Riviére's view and revoked his decision in a footnote that reads in part:
Je m'accuse d'avoir ainsi parlé de Stravinsky. Je ne connaissais encoreque le Sucre du Printemps, j'aurais dû voir déjáque Stravinsky tournaitle dos a tout ce que nous cheque dans Wagner…. son oeuvre admirablement disciplinéd… répond le mieux à la stricte rigeur classique….[I regret having thus spoken of Stravinsky. All I had heard was theRite of Spring, and I should have perceived then that Stravinsky wasturning his back on everything we find distasteful in Wagner…. his admirably disciplined work… best answers the strict classical “austerity….”][15]
As I have already indicated, I am not convinced that Stravinsky's takingup residence in America is what determined his influence among young American composers, though they both happened around the same timeand his presence may have helped. Yet it was altogether appropriate that the movement should have Harvard as its locus and should have had its beginnings just when Stravinsky delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Nortonlectures there (1939–40). Also Nadia Boulanger, who would have spawnedthe movement without any help from the master, came to Cambridge in 1938 as visiting faculty at the Longy School of Music and remainedthrough most of the war years. (Stravinsky said she knew more about hismusic than he did.) A whole cluster of circumstances was favorable to the burgeoning of a Stravinsky school. Not least among them was the presenceof Walter Piston as the senior composition teacher at Harvard with his neo-classic leanings, for example, and especially the powerful influence of humanism over the intellectual attitude of faculty and students of the entireuniversity as a result of the long tenure of the distinguished proponent of the humanist movement Irving Babbitt. Babbitt's remonstrances against Romanticism echoed and reechoed through the corridors of that hallowed institution for many years after he had departed from it.
Stravinsky's allusions to the music of the past were not directed towardachieving results that would be modeled after the sources, since the interpolated material could be willfully distorted, like the human bodies in Picasso's cubist paintings, or cut into bits and pieces as if they were to be usedfor a collage. Scraps of newspaper in this process are not usually chosenfor their verbal content. Painters do not expect them to be read. What is atissue is the shape and texture and how they relate to other shapes and textures on the same canvas. The listener whose attention is arrested at the point where a musical fragment evokes its past is like the viewer whospends his time reading the newsprint on the scrap of paper of the collage. To the extent that Stravinsky subsumed linear shapes, methods, and ideasfrom the general practice of the music of the Classical era he was doingsomething not altogether unlike what he had been doing when he compiled-ready-made Russian folksong, though in the end the methods, aim, and result were very different. By the time he did the same thing with Classicalmusic it was just as much in public domain as his folk sources. In a veryreal sense, moreover, as many listeners will agree, the Classical sourcesnever really disguised the real Stravinsky: there was still a strong residueof his native rhythmic heritage that animated his later works. Michael Tilson Thomas has observed, “Even in his abstract music …there was anorganic dance-rooted quality.” Further, as a conductor “he made gesturesand let out moans, grunts, and gasps—the kind of thing one could associate with peasant dance and song.”[16]
The late pianist-composer Leo Smit observed, “When Stravinsky reworked older material, it became something so new that even the composerhimself became confused at times over where the other left off and Stravinsky began.”[17] Smit told me about an encounter with the master in the forties at one of the gatherings of musicians my late first wife Esther and I hadat our apartment in New York when the subject came up of Baiser de la fee (The Fairy's Kiss), the ballet based on Tchaikovsky. He asked Stravinskywhere in Tchaikovsky did he find the theme of the fortune-teller. Stravinsky replied that he wrote it himself, but years later Smit found it in a Tchaikovsky song, “Oh Pain, Oh Pleasure,” the key having been changed from A major to A minor. (In one of the many conversations with Craft in a bookpublished in 1962 Stravinsky admitted, “At this date I only vaguely remember which music is Tchaikovsky's and which mine.”)[18]
In the matter of the “return to the past” among the members of the Harvard Stravinsky school there was, as I have indicated, one exception who
Dans le tumulte des opinions contradictoires, mon ami Maurice Ravelintervint presque seul pour mettre les choses au point. II a su voir et ila dit que la nouveauté du Sacre ne residait pas dans 1'ecriture, dans 1'instrumentation, dans 1'appareil technique de 1'oeuvre, mais dans 1'entite musicale. [In the tumult of contradictory opinions my friend Maurice Ravel intervened practically alone to set matters right. He was ableto see, and he said, that the novelty of the Rite consisted, not in the “writing,” not in the orchestration, not in the technical apparatus of the work, but in the musical entity.][19]
Hearers were so overwhelmed by what they considered revolutionary inthe Rite that they failed to perceive, as we do now, that it was essentially afurther stage in Impressionism. The values of traditional and modern arereversed in Shapero's case. To apprehend his individuality within the outward veneer of conservatism will take time, application, and a willing attitude, just as, contrariwise, the capacity to apprehend the traditional inthe Rite did. I am reasonably sure the individuality is there since one candetect its influence when it shows up in a disciple like Leo Smit, or in Shapero's peers, Bernstein, Irving Fine, and perhaps myself as well.
Shapero's Symphony for Classical Orchestra completed in 1947 whenhe was twenty-seven was acclaimed by Stravinsky and Copland and promptly performed a year later under the baton of Bernstein, who recorded it for Columbia Records. But despite this illustrious beginning Shapero's composing activity tapered off in a manner that some of us havefound puzzling. Could it have been the backlash that set in early on thatdiscouraged him? A little over a year after Bernstein gave the symphony'spremiere with the BSO, for instance, the League of Composers presented Shapero's lengthy Sonata in F minor at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and it created what I should not quite call a riot, but certainly a decidedturmoil. (My review of the concert in the New York Herald Tribune, 8 March 1949, will be found in the appendix.) George Perle, the composer(twelve-tone at the time but more recently involved with an interesting system of his own) and the author of the invaluable introductory Serial Composition and Atonality,[20] stood up and shouted, “Viva Beethoven!” I
On the other hand, things can be pretty awkward when the mindset and the actual experience clash, as in the case of the former powerful Times critic Olin Downes, who was vehemently opposed to Stravinsky's internationalism even before it evolved into neoclassicism and who was positive hewould hate any music cast in that mode. Thus, he had to go through somepretty ridiculous linguistic contortions when he found that a Stravinskypiece which in principle he should not have liked was actually to his taste, though his conviction of its allegedly unsavory backward-looking aestheticshould have dictated otherwise: “Histoire du Soldat appeared after he hadceased to be creative…. Perhaps some of the inertia of the creative will, the despair of sterility, contribute to the effectiveness of this score. Stravinsky of obviously waning powers achieves from his very decline somethingof a masterpiece.”[21] (There is a certain irony in the circumstance that Downes's convoluted reasoning is not unlike what Lang—quoted earlier in this chapter—had to say about Brahms, since basically the two composersare so different from each other.) Downes was a master of the art of reversing his position without seeming to contradict himself. Another review that demonstrates his legerdemain in this matter dealt with Apollon musa-gete on the occasion of its world premiere in Washington, D.C., on 27 April 1928, when after constantly complaining about Stravinsky's unwarranted harking back to the past Downes now saw it, so we may gather from hisTimes review, as the “effort, the heroic effort, of an artist who turned awayfrom the anarchies of the present and tried to retrace his steps…,” thusemploying what was formerly his negative criterion as a positive one.
Shapero may have been a charter member of the young Harvard Stravinskians, but he never went in much for the interrupted line, the jaggedshapes, the precipitous cutting, the dissonance, the hiccups and asymmetryof rhythm, the skeletal texture and other such devices of Stravinsky thatappealed to the rest of us. These were what characterized the master's music of his so-called neoclassic period and distinguished him from otherswho have been designated “neoclassicists” —Hindemith and Prokofiev, for
It is idle to quibble about labels but I have some trouble calling the new Romanticists “necromantic,” since that locution was used by Virgil Thomson for a movement that originated in France, particularly among painters, including Eugene Berman. The chief musical representative of the movement was Henri Sauguet, and Thomson singled out Irving Fine as its American representative. What distinguished neoromanticism was its evocation of early Romanticism, the intimacy and unpretentiousness of Schubert or Schumann before the genre was puffed up with the grandiosity of Wagner and Mahler.
The new Romanticists to whom Rockwell was referring included composers like George Rochberg and David Del Tredici. A contemporary Romanticist who does not “go back” to the past is Leon Kirchner. The wholeatonal movement, despite its preference for condensation, ironically hadsome roots in Wagner and Mahler, evident in the Gargantuan Gurrelieder and the hyper-Romantic Transfigured Night. Kirchner's powerful and intensely felt music picks up the thread where Schoenberg and Berg left it before they became engaged in a more rigorously organized approach to serialism. For Kirchner, despite some serial elements, it is almost as if strictserialism never existed, but it has not been his aim to return to the nineteenth century. Nor was a return, in his case to the eighteenth century, the aim of Stravinsky and his satellites, as I have already said, when they hadrecourse to eighteenth-century models. The idea was, rather, to challenge,
In listening to this music, if one does not assume the role of tune detective, dispensing demerits upon every allegedly “illegal” allusion to other music, one must inevitably be aware of the ingenuity and invention thatcan be found to be there, its accessibility not at all occluded as it might bein, say, Webern or Xenakis by difficulty or strange modernist procedure, but clearly audible to the sympathetic and attentive listener. Coached bymusicographers of all types (historians as well as critics) to believe that “looking back” is unnatural, audiences are only too happy to have an excuse to drop any music considered “unnatural” —especially if it is new music such as this—from their usual repertory, and to use their listening timeinstead to bask in the warmly familiar, unchallenging company of their customary “fifty pieces.” True, a work like the Rake is not entirely neglected, but why should it not be a staple, like Der Rosenkavalier? And there are all those orchestral masterpieces of the thirties and forties we almost never hear and for my taste are still too infrequently played: Jeu decartes (A Game of Cards), Danses concertantes,“umbarton Oaks” Concerto, the “Basle” Concerto, and the two symphonies. Also, Persephone and Oedipus Rex, the two choral masterpieces.
The last time I saw Stravinsky it was on the West Coast, shortly beforehe died. I bemoaned with him the sad fact that we heard so little of his music of this epoch at concerts, or even in recordings on the air. He looked atme with a glint in his eyes that prepared me for one of his characteristic barbs, and said, “Only my Scheherazade they play.” I think of this whencomposers of my generation—or I myself—complain that they don't playour music. We have scarce reason to complain when they don't even dojustice to Stravinsky. Incidentally, I thought he coined the witticism onthe spot until I found it in an entry to his diary for 15 December 1961. When proudly told somewhere in New Zealand that half a program of hisworks had once been given he thought to himself, “my Scheherazade nodoubt.”[24]
When I refer to the accessibility of Stravinsky's music of this middle period I have in mind a certain phenomenon that is characteristic of some great artthrough the ages (though it is not obligatory for any artist to conform tothis prescription). As in Shakespeare or Mozart it is as if the music operates on two levels. The blood and thunder, the intrigues in Shakespeare, or
Ex. 9. Stravinsky Chords
It may very well be that Debussy's concern for timbre had something todo with Stravinsky's choice of unusual spacing and doubling. But there seems to have been more to it than that. He once confided in me, when we
Ex. 10. Beethoven, “Diabelli” Variations, No. XXI
Being sensitive to the precise quality of the chords is only one of the requirements for hearing what is essential in neoclassic Stravinsky. There isthe matter of the pitch organization which, because it is often diatonic and may have a pitch priority analogous to the traditional tonic, lends itself torelaxed listening in which one might fancy one hears tonality though the music is essentially nontonal. In my analysis of one of the parameters ofPsalms I have drawn attention to the stratification that made it difficult todecide whether E or G had priority. A somewhat different bifurcation isencountered in the Serenade in A, where the title leads us to expect A astone center, and A major or A minor as the basic key. But it turns out wehave the pitch collection (notes or scale degrees) of F major in which the
Once again we are up against the difficulties of verbalizing, for these arefairly simple operations to hear, but they may sound complicated, even—that forbidding epithet— “intellectual” when described. I shall investigatelater the relationship between such formulations and the proper apprehension of music as heard (see chapter 13).
6. Serialism
Composer as Theorist
When I paid a visit to Arnold Schoenberg in 1941 at his Hollywood abode I found I had to approach the house through an ornate massive iron gatebehind which, next to a small pool, two huge St. Bernards were barking menacingly at me and Esther who accompanied me. We were fearful (atleast I was) of the dogs, so instead of opening the gate and walking in, werang the bell, and when there was no answer we drove to the nearest gasstation and phoned. Schoenberg said that because of the wet weather the bell wasn't working, but the dogs would not harm us and we should simplywalk in past them. We followed the instructions and were ushered into adaintily furnished room, obviously a parlor for visitors that did not looklived in—no casually placed papers or magazines, no books that I recall. Itwas not an ambience in which I expected to find Schoenberg, who was anything but the “clean-cut” type, as the saying goes.
The meeting had been arranged by Darius Milhaud, a more recent refugee than Schoenberg from besieged Europe. Milhaud had been (with myconsent as leading composition teacher) appointed visiting professor at Mills College during my second year on the faculty, and was then accordedtenure to replace me there after (his salary to be paid by a wealthy San Francisco family). We had become close friends and Milhaud was “desole” that I was being terminated, so he thought Schoenberg might help getme hired at University of California-Los Angeles, where he was then atenured professor. Schoenberg asked me whether I knew anyone on the board of trustees of his university since he thought that was the way onegot a job in America. I didn't, so that was that, and we then talked aboutother things. I had a greeting to deliver from Milhaud: “Mille baisers pourpet it Arnold” (a thousand kisses for little Arnold). Looking at the austere
It was certainly no surprise that at the beginning Babbitt's theories metwith a good deal of dissension, mostly from older musicians who had beenborn too early to have been brought up with the new math and were unfamiliar with or unreceptive to positivist philosophical thinking. A certainamount of density and complexity in its concepts was to be expected in the explication of a new musical language, especially in one that was so dependent on numerical relations. After all, serialism was undergoing birth painssimilar to those that tonality, which it aimed to replace, must have undergone at the start of the eighteenth century. Readers of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Traite d'Harmonie (Treatise on Harmony) in 1722 when it was published must have had difficulty with its codification of the rules of harmony, a difficulty compounded by what its English translator Philip Gossett characterized as the “tortuous lines of thought” in its explication.[2] The Princeton school, which is how it has been known since Babbitt was a professor atthe university, took upon itself a similar responsibility, and we expected it to be difficult, but we were not prepared for quite such an esoteric language—especially trying for those of us who were not at ease in science—that aimed at brushing away the cobwebs, the ambiguities, the metaphysical baggage of traditional musicography, not only in the treatment of serialmusic, but in that of any music at all. Ironically it introduced other impediments. The process of cleaning up the language did not make it clearer and friendlier for many of us, for, in the words of its pilot: “…there is but onekind of language, one kind of method for the verbal formulation of concepts
New terms were to be expected, and so were concepts that would be difficultat first. But I am not sure many of us were ready for a situation in whichlanguage formation would become an end in itself. It seemed, moreover, tohave been spawned by a desire at first to keep the discoveries private, and little attempt was made to define the proliferation of new terms for the outsider.
I argued with the true believers over why some perfectly ordinaory termshad to be changed: for example, “simultaneity” for chord, or “set” for the original expressions “row” or “series” (still used abroad), even though Igranted that set theory might be useful in dealing with operations performed on the row. The response I received was that some of it was ordinary language, and there should be no difficulty understanding the newterms. That was not to my satisfaction and when I raised the problem withmy friend Noam Chomsky he suggested an analogy that was very revealing. I don't recall his exact words but I can paraphrase it. Suppose we cameacross the following sentence: The letter-sequences“boy” and “lad” maybe said to be fairly synonymous and each “letter-sequence” has three letters in one syllable. We could figure out from the context what “letter-sequence” meant, but we would want a good reason why a new term for anything as commonplace as “word” is needed. A new term (“simultaneity”) for chord seems hardly necessary though I admit it is an attractive concept. I did not find it convincing when I was told it was necessary simply becausechords have evolved to a point where they are very different from the traditional textbook triadic type and a new term would pay tribute to thatdifference—if indeed my informant was a reliable spokesman of the movement. As I see it they are still chords, even if they are merely the convergence of contrapuntal lines and are not built in thirds like traditional triadsand seventh and ninth chords.
Jean Piaget has established that the child is capable of “concrete operation” at the age of seven and by adolescence acquires a capacity of abstraction
In the years when I was more deeply involved in Princeton thinking Imyself, I should confess, sometimes felt that the old words did not conveymy thought since I did not have confidence in the reader's ability to separate the signifier from implications it had accumulated over time. I wasdealing with the diatonic modes in “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” published in Perspectives of New Music fPNMj in 1963,[5] and I was concerned over the baggage the modes had accumulated over the centuries as the mainstay in Greek and medieval music and especially the associations that clung to them as a result of their evocations of the gentlepastoral in some early modern music of Impressionist leaning. And so Icalled them simply “scales” and distinguished them from one anotherthus: “D-scale” (Dorian), “E-scale” (Phrygian), etc. As I look back it seemsto have been quite unnecessary. (I should add that I'm aware it is nowhereon the grand scale of Princeton terminology but, as one who has complained as loudly as anyone about the new esoteric Princeton language, Ifeel I should report my complicity in the hope it may help me avoid the re-monstration “you did it too.”)
Some of us wrote twelve-tone music without observing the rules promulgated by what I once named the “New Theorists” of the Princeton school, with New Criticism of the American literary domain in the back of mymind—something Joseph Kerman was quick to pick up (see chapter 14). Such composers were considered not “strict” but, after all, Schoenberg hadalso written twelve-tone music without the benefit of the Princeton theorists. By the sixties composers at various stages of twelve-tone composition
Serial composers were designated cerebral and academic even if they were outside the learned Princeton circle. This was because they had to beconstantly vigilant to be sure that they were operating within the disciplineof serialism. It was quite unlike what was required of tonal composers orthe pre-serial composers of this century. Besides being brought up on tonalmusic, most composers had to spend two or more years studying its theory and practice, so the process of choosing notes, harmonies, rhythms, etc.seemed to be guided to a considerable extent by intuition, but was actuallythe product of long and rigorous drilling. As with riding a bicycle, youdrew upon your previous instruction without having to commune withyourself in discursive terms to find out what to do next. Whether such astate will ever be attained in the relationship of most of us to serial composition is hard to say, though some people seem to have reached it already. But the processes that govern the composing methods need not insinuate themselves into the process of directly apprehending the heard result. It isnigh impossible to persuade listeners and critics that this is so—that is tosay, that they do not need some special password they had never needed forthe music written before.
At the same time the necessity of responding to the requirements of adiscipline of such rigorous intellectual caliber as serialism has made theorists out of some composers in a way that has had no precedent in recentcenturies (though it could have been found among medieval composers).[6] And this, in turn, was an advantage to composers who sought, for their very survival, some escape in the universities from the alternative ofhaving to cope with the commercialism of the marketplace, such as it is. Stravinsky warned young composers to stay away from university teaching. He was concerned about the conformity that it bred. There is a danger that in the scholarly papers required from faculty by the university for advancement, professors of music will try too hard to conform to the standard of fellow faculty in science and philosophy, and drive music theory further than it already is into the mire of scientific obscurantism. There alsois a question of the public image, the upholders (critics in particular) of the age-old complaint that new music is too “academic” now being able topoint to the tangible evidence that can be adduced from a composer'slifestyle—claiming, namely, that composers are writing academic musicbecause they are in fact academicians.
The theories that Babbitt has constructed, though difficult to follow, havedone much to illuminate serial practice for some of us in the way Heinrich Schenker, very loosely speaking, illuminated tonality. I have felt, however, that those close to Babbitt could have done a better job explicating the language for those of us who were at a distance. Instead they were concernedwith using the language to add their own scientific constructs. I have inmind such theorists as Ben Boretz, Godfrey Winham, Jim Randall, Michael Kassler, Philip Batstone, and John Rahn, the cream of the intellectuals. Onehad to understand the language to recognize that they all had different concepts to advance, but for some of us on the outside they seemed to be saying somewhat the same thing as Babbitt and one another. We should havewelcomed the kind of simple explanations that were provided by Gerald Warfield in his cogent annotations for Babbitt's “Some Aspects of Twelve-tone Compositio” —the seminal article originally published in Score and I. M. A. Magazine in 1955—when it was reprinted in Twentieth Century Views of Music History in 1972.[7] Unfortunately it was fifteen or twenty years late.
Even so elementary a matter as Babbitt's numbering the members of a twelve-tone row (which he called “set” after set theory) from zero toeleven was puzzling to some of us at first. For many of my generation our indoctrination into the rites of twelve-tonery had been the English translation of a French treatise by Renée Leibowitz and we numbered the twelvetones as the Europeans still do, from one to twelve.[8] Not everyone of mygeneration was brought up with instruction in the new math, with its settheory and concepts such as Mod. 12. Nor were we privileged with the intelligence that the numbering of the row zero to eleven had analytical advantages: for example, among other things, that under this convention the interval number of any member of the set plus the interval number of itsinversion would be twelve. Ultimately, however, it made a good deal ofsense to me, and was even a revelation, something some of us had neverthought about. Namely, the numbering made it evident to me that we werecounting intervals, not notes. When the first member of the row is soundedthere is no interval (though I realize some perfectionist might insist there could be a unison).[9]
Very likely Babbitt never thought anyone would have trouble with amatter like this, which is how I thought when I did this sort of thing in asmall way, updating the names for the modes. I bring it up because I havebeen someone who has complained loudly about the new terminology. Tobe truthful, therefore, I must admit that I joined the club well before Babbitt came upon the scene, as Edward T. Cone was to remind me in his 1965
When I took exception to Milton's advocacy of scientific language for music theory I had to remind myself of my admiration for Aristoxenos, the ancient Greek father of all Western theorists of harmony, who could callhis contribution scientific, yet carefully distinguish it from the scientism ofhis contemporary Pythagoras and insist on the judgment of the ear. Where Babbitt's language was concerned, outside of terms borrowed from set theory it was not the scientific orientation that caused us most trouble but ourconviction that the concepts were difficult enough without the additionalburden of the occult language in which they were conveyed. There wasmuch discussion of obscurantism in the early days of the Princeton theorists, though it failed to give rise to a sufficiently clear and explicit elucidation on a large scale. Even their mouthpiece PNM aired the dilemma manyof us found ourselves in. There were three almost consecutive early contributions dealing with the matter. I have already mentioned one of them, Cone's glossary, an article that had a good-natured appendix in which the author amusingly discusses serial music in “ordinary language” and then in “up-to-date musical parlance.” He lets Babbitt down gently, observing, rather too generously in my view, that the way Milton would refer back tohis first use of a term was “a model of correct scholarly practice.” In my experience I did not find this too often to be true, and where it was true it wasnot sufficient to clarify the terms.
Another article on the subject of terminology in PNM appeared in 1966, in which a composer of no mean intellectual attainment, Ernst Krenek, expressed himself angrily:
… many terms currently in use belong to a vocabulary lying outsideof the scope of usual musical terminology. For all we know, they belongto the jargon of the special branch of mathematics known as set-theory The application of this language to musical matters can be understoodonly by individuals who are at home in both fields. This group is limited to those graduates of Princeton University who have attended the courses of Milton Babbitt, who is in the enviable position of being aneminent musician as well as a distinguished scientist.[11]
The first of the triad of pieces in PNM dealing with this subject was myown: “New Linguistic Modes and the New Theory” (1963), which I haveused as the basis for chapter 14.[12]
Composers, as I have already remarked (and as it is very well known), spend a minimum of two years mastering tonal theory and often considerably more during their student days. It should not be surprising that they should also have to spend time studying twelve-tone method. In the earlydays of twelve-tonery they had to do so under very different conditions—not while they were getting a preparatory education, since the subject wasnot yet taught, but while they were already accepted as professionals in the music field. (It is still far from adequately covered in the schools.) Since somany were teachers they had to articulate in a language other than musical notation what their objectives were as composers, not only to be sure that they were properly functioning within the requirements of serial discipline themselves but also to convey to their students the principles and practical methods of placing tones in meaningful relationship.
Whether they present their theoretical notions superbly or inadequately, composer-theorists are liable to be viewed with suspicion, their creativity seriously placed in doubt in the eyes of those who believe that anabsorption in directly apprehended qualities is upset beyond repair by anydigression into discursive thinking or talking about those qualities, and above all by the type of analysis summarily dismissed as “technical” (implying that the most penetrating critico-structural investigation, largely byvirtue of its illustrations in music notation and its charts, is on the samelevel as, say, a handbook on trumpet fingering). It is ironic that those whofeel that taking a work apart is like pulverizing an object, so that it is nolonger recognizable as such, should be wary of music examples as too technical
The opposition to musical analysis since about the mid-twentieth century has been motivated, I believe, by the resentment against its being guided by scientific principles. But there is more than one kind of analysis, more than one kind of theory. Rational human beings (I believe they include composers) are genetically inclined to verbalize experience. (Thecapacity for language, as Chomsky argues, is innate.) They do so not onlyfor practical purposes, but to ask, often gratuitously, “how,” “why,” and “what.” For the “intuitive” composers to insist there is but one type of composer, the nonanalytic type, is like the most prescriptive reactionary insisting that there is but one way to write music: the traditional way. The skeptical attitude toward the composer-theorist is an aspect of a general antagonism toward music analysis and theory. The artwork is inviolable and anyone who takes it apart to show how it is made commits what is tantamount to a criminal, or rather, perhaps, a sacrilegious, act. Indeed, wherethe artwork is concerned there is something of a religious component. The
7. Rapprochement or
Friendly Takeover?
In the fifties the two leading camps in the world of contemporary composition, the followers of Schoenberg and those of Stravinsky, who had inhabited opposite sides of the barricades for well nigh half a century, finallymade peace. The eventuality was sometimes referred to as a “rapprochement,” but for some composers, Stravinsky among them, it was actuallymore like a friendly takeover on the part of the serialists. Or perhaps itwould be fairer to say that for Stravinsky and the others it started as a rapprochement (for example, in a work like Agon, completed 1957, in which twelve-tone canons remarkably coexist without any clash at all alongsidea great deal of dissonant diatonic writing) and culminated in 1959 as afriendly takeover. One could view works like Movements for Piano and Orchestra, given the affinity of its idiom to that of the Second Viennese School, especially of Anton Webern, as exemplifying such a process—notwithstanding, at the same time, Stravinsky's unmistakable signature particularly in rhythm. For other composers it never got beyond the stage of rapprochement (Copland, for example). Though the point at which Stravinsky finally abandoned diatonism seemed sudden and ever so surprising, he was no stranger to nondodecaphonic serialism which he had practicedat least since Symphony of Psalms but with ideas usually consisting offewer than twelve tones. Significant examples are the Interlude in Orpheus (1947), pp. 45–46 of the orchestra score, and the Concerto per due piano-forti soli (1935), from the middle of p. 10. So it was not a case of a suddenvolte-face on Stravinsky's part. Yet it seemed like one, since, though it wasunderstood he would adopt the systematic processes of serialism, it was asurprise to some that the result as manifested in Movements would be soclose in manner to the traditional serialists.
Around the time of his conversion Stravinsky engaged in a bit of deconstruction
All of this fits in with the claim of Boulez, as quoted in an interview, that Schoenberg and Stravinsky “both went wrong by the late twenties, whenthey tried to adapt their post-tonal harmonic languages to neoclassical forms.”[3] Now it seems to me there is a serious misconception here—a confusion between the superficial textbook formula of, say, sonata, fugue, orminuet, and the essential structure of an individual's concrete creativemusical production in using these formulae. The choice of one or another conventional form, especially without the functional tonal procedures soessential to them, is a bit like choosing a jacket. The person donning itscarcely changes at all, and what is essential to him or her is not in the jacket but in the nature of the individual wearing it. What I'm trying to sayis that sometimes the Classicism was quite superficial and the music thatflowed from Schoenberg's pen was essentially modern. Too much is madeof the use of the traditional forms which are really surface phenomena tobe found in a textbook. The relation to the original music composed underthe same titles in the Classical or Baroque eras is either one of name only, or at most an attribute on the outermost plane.
It makes for a neat historical picture to assume that Schoenberg's death in 1951 should have served as the symbolic occasion for Stravinsky's conversion
It may very well be that Schoenberg's death was not what provided the impetus for Stravinsky's surprising reversal since he never gave us anyreason to believe it was so, though it was scarcely the kind of informationhe would be inclined to divulge. There were other probable causes and there are those who cannot be dissuaded from the firm conviction that Robert Craft, as his amanuensis and adviser, took advantage of his position toindoctrinate Stravinsky into the wonders of serialism and prod him intoadvancing to what at that time seemed a more contemporary position. Inthe sixth and last of his books of conversation with Stravinsky, Craftglosses over the matter with a show of wit: “Clearly I am thought of as aplenipotentiary (rather than as a famulus, which is more often the case, orsatellite, or jester), as well as a gray eminence who ‘operates’ I.S. and is responsible for shanghaiing him into the ‘la-tone system’ (as if anyone couldeven lead that horse to water, if it didn't want to go, let alone make itdrink).”[4]
Very likely there was no single reason. It could have been a tide change, and one of the things that could have brought that about is a certain metamorphosis that twelve-tone composition had undergone since the thirtiesand early forties when it had been thoroughly imbued with the national character of its origin. It had exuded, in the view of some hostile observers, what was construed to be the airless aroma of dimly illuminated Vienneseattics and seemed adapted only to the expression of the gloomiest sentiments. In the course of the forties it began to liberate itself from these associations and developed into an international technique suitable foranyone anywhere and adaptable to a variety of national characters, as wellas a variety of moods. We had Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy, Pierre Boulezin France, Milton Babbitt in the United States, and in Britain, not quite a twelve-tone composer, Peter Maxwell Davies who used magic squares in asomewhat serialist fashion. At the same time the limited expressive range that had adhered to atonality and serialism since their inception was noticeably
Of no little significance in this regard was the circumstance that Aaron Copland, whose accession to serialism was every bit as surprising as Stravinsky's, should have undergone somewhat the same development ashis fellow composer and at the same time, but just falling short of crossingthe line into an echt serialist camp. Around 1930, notwithstanding his palpable individuality, his debt to the Russian master had been generally acknowledged and he was dubbed “Brooklyn Stravinsky.” But by 1950 hewas very much on his own and in complete command of his destiny. I amquite sure that his development at that time had nothing to do with Stravinsky's. Copland's profile, as I have said, fits the description of rapprochement more than Stravinsky's. Copland had also dealt with short nondo-decaphonic serial elements in the thirties, notably in his Piano Variations. But when he became a twelve-tone composer he never quite let go of hisdiatonic, tonal indoctrination. Even in those works written around 1960, when he came closest to serialism, for example in the Piano Fantasy (1957) and Connotations for orchestra (1962), there was still a residue of the “good old” major and minor triads. He never went as far as Stravinsky didin the direction of chromatic serialism. To those of his followers who felthe had let them down, he explained, “As I see it, twelve-tonism is nothingmore than an angle of vision. Like fugal treatment, it is a stimulus that enlivens musical thinking. …it is a method, not a style.”[5] Discussing the work on one occasion, he said that his aim was to combine “elements ableto be associated with twelve-tone music and with music tonally conceived.” As for the row he employed in the Fantasy (ten rather than twelve tones: Et-Bt-F-Dl-B-Flt-A-G-D-C), “a good case,” he told me, “could be made forthe view that the over-all tonal orientation is that of E major.”
Curiously enough, about a year after Schoenberg died, an interviewerfor the New York Herald Tribune confronted Stravinsky with the question “…there has been much talk recently about the possibility of your embracing twelve-tone atonal principles?” And Stravinsky replied: “Talk istalk and cheap. Certain twelve-tone things I like, certain I don't. For instance, I have tremendous respect for the discipline imposed upon the twelve-tone man. It is a discipline that you find nowhere else.…Twelvetone
I cannot vouch for the fact that my fellow composers among the Harvard Stravinskians, who still maintained their identity as a group in the fifties, joined the ranks of the serialists without being provoked by Stravinsky's example: Louise Talma, Irving Fine, and Ingolf Dahl, for instance, could quite conceivably have been following the master's example. In myown case I do not think it was Stravinsky who, for the most part, was responsible for my change of direction or, more precisely, my return to anearlier stage of my development. My first compositions that were not exercises in Classical style for credit in my college courses were twelve-tone or what I thought around 1930 was twelve-tone—compositions I wroteimmediately after being stunned by my first hearing of any Schoenberg. Later, in my diatonic music I preserved a certain fragmentation and the angularity and wide skips characteristic of Webern (though these characteristics, it should be noted, are not of the essence of serialism), to the extent that Babbitt was motivated to give credence to the locution “diatonic Webern” which was being used with increasing frequency in the fifties to characterize my music of that period.[7]
When I did return to serialism, notably in my String Quartet (1958), farfrom being accused of emulating Stravinsky in this development, I wasonce embarrassed by the suggestion that I might have influenced him!Chamber Music for Thirteen Players was a work I wrote in 1956 close tomy arrival at serialism, and tongue-in-cheek I described it as “neoclassic twelve-tone.” Reviewing this work in the New York Times, Eric Salzmanwrote, “This is just the sort of thing that Stravinsky has done recently only Berger did it first. Come to think of it, the work was first performed at aconcert series in Los Angeles which Stravinsky often attends. Wonder if hewas there?”[8] Knowing how sensitive Stravinsky was to criticism I wasterrified that he might see the review. My concern intensified when I heardthe story that was circulating by word of mouth about Stravinsky beingsummoned before the pope during the period in which he was rehearsingthe Rake in Rome. The specific time proposed was right after a rehearsal, and Stravinsky told the pope he would like some time to wash and clean up. “Come as you are,” said the pope. In the course of their conversation the pope asked him what bothered him most of all things. “I'm ashamed to admit it,” he answered, “but I cannot bear adverse criticism,” at which the
I had been reverting gradually at that period to my incipient serialismof the early thirties. The British composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks wroteabout me as follows in 1953: “Twenty years ago it was said of the Atonalists and Neo-Classicists that ‘never the twain would meet.’ Nowadays, particularly in America, one sees blends of various kinds taking place betweenatonal contrapuntal and neo-classic vertical or harmonic composition, and Arthur Berger is one of the most successful, most delicate results of the hybridisation.”[9] Notice that she avoids the epithets “serial” and “twelve-tone.” The experts may be able to identify a strict twelve-tone serial work. But for most listeners what is heard is a certain style that strictly serialworks share with a variety of atonal practices. Counting notes to determineif all twelve are there and participate in a constant rollover is a naive and unreliable approach. Discussing his Composition for Four Instruments Babbitt observed, “Not incidentally, I was not aware—either during itscomposition or well after it—that the twelve pitch class series underlyingthe work never appears as a totality in any explicit representation. As a referential norm, it is pervasively and persistently influential, acting at constantly varying distances from the work's surface.”[10]
An exchange in Partisan Review in 1948, when that periodical was in itsheyday, between a spokesman for Schoenberg (Rene Leibowitz) and aspokesman for Stravinsky (Nicolas Nabokov) left the impression of a desperation on the part of the Stravinskians in their last-minute struggle tosurvive. It was patently an augury of their defeat. Leibowitz, whose pro-Schoenberg forces were on the rise, could be sufficiently confident of success in this matter to indulge in some humor, and he remarked on the ironyof the two antagonists having settled down close to each other in Southern California and having both come “as far as a European can ‘go west.’ It isstrange that two men so different in every respect should have chosen thisplace to live and work in. For even though they are both living in a city thatis dominated by the motion picture industry, neither one has anything todo with motion pictures.”[11] For Nabokov serialism had the “earmarks of a Messianic cult,” and far from being innovative it was the last stage in a harmonic development that could be traced back to 1600, whereas Stravinsky, on the other hand, had proclaimed a new domain that would start a newcycle—the domain of rhythm.[12]
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