But if you can have "overcomposed monstrosities" can you have, what, "undercomposed dwarves"? My mind briefly contemplates a Schenkerian trying to do an analysis of Steve Reich's Drumming, part one...The twelve-tone method was invented precisely to produce the sort of maximalized motivic consistency and saturated texture that analysts look for. Clearly Schoenberg was motivated by the ideal that Shawn invokes to tout his work. But that does not make it any more pertinent or available to the listener's experience. And promoting it into a primary musical value is the ultimate poietic fallacy, the one that led modern music into the cul-de-sac sac where absurdly overcomposed monstrosities by Elliott Carter or Milton Babbitt have been reverently praised by critics and turned into obligatory models for emulation by teachers of composition.Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 4763-4766). Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
For much of my life I was, at least from time to time, a composer, but one with no credentials and no training apart from the urge to compose. For the last ten years or so I have worked on the tools and craft of composition, slowly moving across the landscape from a purely intuitive process to one that has come to seek out form, proportion and process. I'm still not a member of what Taruskin calls the academically-trained composer's guild as I only very briefly took lessons in composition from a member of that guild. But I now work with a creative intuition informed by an intellectual grasp of form.
Or so one hopes!
In opposition to what Taruskin calls the "poietic fallacy," the belief that all that matters is how the composition was made, I do indeed seek to create something that the listener can enjoy--perhaps not in the most superficially pleasurable manner, which I associate with music that adheres to sentimental clichés, but in the most expressive manner I can find, at least.
Ultimately it comes back to the age-old dynamic of repetition versus variety. In a lot of Schoenberg's work, he manages the amazing feat of making music that is actually very tightly-written, sound almost random in its astonishing variety. I really think that the opposite is more suitable to my aesthetic needs: to make music that has a good amount of variety sound tightly written.
But without the excessive use of drones!
Nico Muhly: Drones in Large Cycles
Elliott Carter is one of those cases where Taruskin gets extremely disingenuous. For many years now, he has depicted Carter as as composer only the critics like and advocate for. Nope, Carter does have his fanbase among ordinary music lovers who are not critics or musicians themselves. It may be a small one, but it exists nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely recall places where Taruskin has said nice things about Carter. I have never managed to get much into Carter's music, but I haven't given up!
ReplyDeleteWhile I don't particularly like Schoenberg's music I do defend his adoption of the serial method as an understandable reaction to the situation he was faced with - the exhaustion of Wagnerian tonal chromatic harmony. I emphatically do not think he devised it to please the theorists. It must be remembered that Schoenberg only turned to the serial method after WW1. By that point even the proto Hollywood group as I call the last group of chromaticists was either dead or in the last stages before they too turned to a less chromatically saturated style. Schoenberg was rather teleological in his Germanic thinking so couldn't go back to a simpler style as he explicitly noted in his writings.
ReplyDeleteIt was not really his fault that the method he devised was not adequate in the crunch as a compositional vehicle. He gave it his best shot. I think Varese was more prescient in thinking that a beter way forward was through an expansion of music to include various noises and electronic effects. But Varese was French not German.
Maury, the American composer Ben Johnston considered Schoenberg's stop-gap solution to the over-use of Romantic era chromaticism to be a brilliant short-term solution but that his successors used up the possibilities Schoenberg introduced within a generation. Of course Schoenberg was willing to say nice things about Gershwin which some of his self-designated successors were not willing to say. I'm not exactly a fan of Schoenberg overall but I do, I admit, love to listen to Hahn's recording of his Violin Concerto from time to time. JOhnston, for his part, was a Partsch apprentice who concluded that the better solution to the exhaustion of Romantic vocabulary was jettisoning reliance on equal temperament, which was something he noted that Alois Haba, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Charles Ives, Harry Partsch and other composers had already been doing.
ReplyDeleteEven crankypants Adorno thought that Varese was moving in a positive direction at a time when Adorno regarded serialism as a spent force in the 1950s, but he had good things to say about Varese and Ligeti as composers who were still letting their ears, rather than prescribed systematics of technique, guide their composing activities.
I do think that Schoenberg's approach can be understood in terms of the currents of his time. I have also found aspects of gestural transformation in that school of music useful for some of my projects.
Schoenberg is a composer that inspires a lot of discussion, that's for sure. I too love the Hahn recording of the Violin Concerto, but I also love a lot of the early piano music. Schoenberg is always a challenging listen, but often worthwhile. But that being said, I think it undeniable that while he may not have been writing for future theorists, he also wasn't writing for audiences. A lot of Taruskin's remarks have to be understood in the context of the loss of audiences by serious classical composers over the last century. Example in point, as I do from time to time I go back to Elliot Carter to see if my hearing of him has changed. Here is the first performance video of his String Quartet No. 1 at YouTube:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wrqWDYoHjU
Good performance, but as usual, I have to turn it off after a few minutes as it just clogs up my brain! That clip has had a grand total of 433 views at present.
Perhaps because I was a violinist in school I have never liked Schoenberg's Violin Concerto as it is very un-idiomatic to the instrument. It is intellectually interesting like most of his music. Oddly the only music I really like from him is his choral music whether solo or the choral parts of Moses und Aron. I generally dislike his orchestration because it is so unidiomatic for the instruments.
ReplyDeleteI find 20th C classical choral music quite fascinating and perhaps the most original and lasting innovation it made. As an aside I dislike the choral music of the classical and romantic eras as it is too heavy and squarish unless there are prominent soloists which have much of the action.. So I jump from 1600 to 1920 or so in terms of choral listening.
With a big exception for Haydn, Maury, I am kind of similar that way. Byrd and Tallis and then skip forward to Stravinsky, Poulenc, Rachmaninov, Durufle, Messiaen and bits of Xenakis for choral music.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the Frank Martin mass for double choir is a cool piece, too.
Maury, I hear ya! I have a bit of a bias against really unidiomatic guitar music as well. Returning full circle, one of these is Elliot Carter's piece for solo guitar "Changes." On the other hand, I have grown a bit disenchanted with a lot of the recent music by Leo Brouwer for guitar which is beautifully idiomatic, but musically not very interesting. I prefer his earlier pieces, also idiomatic, but really exciting, like La Espiral Eterna or Elogio de la Danza.
ReplyDeleteYes, let's give a nod to Haydn who wrote some lovely choral music--and Mozart as well. I rather like Frank Martin so I will have to give that mass a listen.