Book Review: Music After the Fall

Before I get into the book, I took this photo the other day where I live in Mexico. Pretty nice for November:

Click to enlarge

And it would be pretty much the same in February.

On to the book. This is a book I have known about for a while, Alex Ross had some favorable comments on it. The book is Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. The "fall" is the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War. I was looking forward to hearing about a lot of recent music I may not have encountered and there certainly is that. But unfortunately, the whole project is marred by an obsessive focus on a progressive, post-modernist interpretation of everything.

The publisher is the University of California Press so one expects a genuinely scholarly work, but the writing uses the shock tactics of journalism. Published in 2017, the book represents the way musical historiography is practiced now. Instead of a conventional opening that, as in the introduction to Taruskin's Oxford history, outlines the kind of journey we will take ("The History of What?"), Rutherford-Johnson leaps into a kind of cinematic montage of several pieces:

It begins with a string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello pumping notes up and down like pistons. An image of the American machine age, hallucinated through the sound of the European Enlightenment.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 1). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It begins with thumping and hammering, small clusters struck on the piano keyboard with the side of the palm or with three fingers pressed together, jabbing like a beak. The sound recalls a malevolent dinosaur or perhaps a furious child, but it isn’t random; a melody of sorts, or an identifiable series of pitches at least, hangs over the tumult.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 1). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It begins with water, gently lapping, close miked. In the distance, the hum of a city. The occasional calls of a gull suggest we are on the coast. A woman’s voice enters, softly describing the location and where she is standing, where we are listening: “It’s a calm morning. I’m on Kits Beach in Vancouver. It’s slightly overcast—and very mild for January.” She is very close, almost inside our ears, but the place she describes and what we can hear is far away.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 2). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It is loud, and it begins instantly. We hear what is probably feedback, controlled in some way to create different pitches. Blank, artificial, but somehow also animal (fleshy at least)—overdriven and very distorted. After a few seconds it is intercut with something like the sound of tape spooling backward—high-pitched, an almost glistening sound. Then sudden, violent splices of what sound like fragments of orchestral music. Again, lots of distortion, electric screams.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (pp. 2-3). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

 Only after these descriptions (and I have only quoted the beginning of each), putting the reader off-balance, does a clarifying narrative begin:

These five works were all composed within a year or so of each other, between 1988 and 1990. Capturing and explaining this sort of diversity presents obvious difficulties for the historian. Yet it also presents an opportunity. If we want to be able to discuss recent music history in any sort of collective sense (and let’s assume that some of us still find it useful to do so), many of the usual ways of writing such a history fall short. This book hopes, in a small way, to contribute to that historical analysis by reconsidering how we tell the history of late twentieth-century music and by looking ahead to what the twenty-first century holds.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 5). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

That's fair enough. The author goes on to defend his choice of a date to begin the discussion: 1989.

Clearly, 1989 was a momentous year. Not only because of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 and the events across Central and Eastern Europe and Russia that followed but also because of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in China and the state-sponsored massacre that ensued and the beginning of a process that would see an end to apartheid in South Africa. The subsequent rapid ascent of a neoliberal political and economic orthodoxy across much of the globe in the 1990s was not a direct consequence of the fall of the wall; many of neoliberalism’s structures had been in place for a decade or more.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 7). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

What is really striking to me about this choice is that it is based purely on political events, not musical ones. Even though the pieces he chose to describe at the open were all written in the period 1988 to 1990, this was not, to my mind, a really important turning point in music.

In their different ways, all five of these works connect with the wider political, social, economic, and technological changes of the time, whether late Cold War geopolitics, the emergence of digital technology, the conditions of modern-day globalization, or the politicization of the personal. Associations like these suggest the first component of my methodological framework: enablement and inspiration.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 17). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

I see the point, of course: what inspires the creation of music and what enables the dissemination of music are important aspects of music history. But they are, to my mind, peripheral in the same way that the kind of manuscript paper Bach used and the kind of poetry that inspired Debussy are peripheral to the musical works they composed.

Technological, social, and political developments can and do influence developments in art in two ways: they either enable them, or they inspire them. That is, a new development can make certain artistic aims possible (through the creation of new technical means, for example), or it can inspire new aesthetic propositions, not necessarily by making use of the new technology, but by pursuing some of its wider implications.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 17). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

Rutherford-Johnson is representative of the viewing of the arts and culture through a therapeutic lens. He actually attempts to reduce the whole aesthetic nature of the five selected works to trauma!

External forces may enable or inspire changes in musical aesthetics, but what in fact are those forces? Looking back to our five examples, they might all be described in relation to trauma. In the Reich and Ustvolskaya pieces, this relationship is clear: in Different Trains, a large-scale historical trauma is approached and to some extent assuaged (through aesthetics, technical intervention, and the narrative of the work); in Ustvolskaya’s sonata, a more personal trauma, the relationship of the individual to the totalitarian state, is presented raw through genuine pain and discomfort. In Sheng’s H’un, another historical trauma is described and partially resolved, similarly to the Reich, although by different stylistic means. Kits Beach Soundwalk is less specifically about trauma, although it does stem from a personal sense of anguish about the dehumanizing impact of the modern sound environment. However, the work did define a mode of musical subjectivity that enabled Westerkamp, a year later, to tackle the much more harrowing topic of the École Polytechnique killings. Merzbow’s work (at least at the time of Cloud Cock OO Grand) does not thematize trauma in the same way as these other pieces do, and it emphatically renounces any programmatic connection to real world events. Nevertheless, the experience of listening to the music, in its harshness, its disorienting, dizzying formlessness, and the aggression of its surrounding discourse, at least imitates trauma, if only to sublimate it or subvert it. This shared ground may suggest a connecting force.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (pp. 18-19). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

I'm sorry for the extensive quotations, but I want to illustrate the author's approach in its proper context. The problem for me is the replacement of any genuine aesthetics by a psychological and collective identity approach. I have railed against the interpretation of every musical composition as an autobiography. I do this not only because I think it is misleading and wrong, but also because there seems to be sufficient evidence that composers, at least up until the present generation, would be the first to condemn this kind of approach. Rutherford-Jones summarizes his approach:

the main developments of the last twenty-five years that might enable or inspire the stylistic development of new music are social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the Internet, late capitalist economics, and the green movement.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 19). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a sense in which this is true, but there is also a sense in which it misses the point. Yes, these are important influences. The music of John Luther Adams, for example, can be understood in terms of its relationship to the green movement. But in so doing you are simply buying the promotion and forgoing the opportunity of critiquing the work in musical terms. Isn't it fairly obvious that the music that is of lasting aesthetic value is that music that manages to not be "about" the shifting political winds of the day? Do composers ever sit down thinking to themselves "now I am going to write a piece about globalization and late capitalist economics"? Maybe some do, but are those the good composers? I see all this stuff as mere marketing buzzwords. Yes, maybe this is how you get the grants and the prizes, but I just don't see any good pieces coming about as a result.

Am I right or just out-of-touch?

For an envoi, let's listen to John Luther Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean: