Our individuality is our most precious resource, and it is probably the one most threatened by the world of high technology we now live in. One of the keenest threats to our individuality however is the steamroller of identity politics because what it steamrollers over is the individuality, not only of the ones who are attacked, white people and males in particular, but especially the ones for whom the attack is ostensibly launched. The identity of black people is erased just as thoroughly as that of white people. And behind it all are always those shadowy manipulators who are the ones who are the real beneficiaries because what you get when you erase individual identity in favor of easily manipulated cohorts is power.
Power.
I could go on at great length about how the relentless promotion of mass transit enables the few to tell the many where and when they can go, about how the minute regulation of every aspect of life again enables the few to tell the many what they can and cannot do, about how the draining off of every possible fee and tax and fine again enables the few to restrict the many from being independent of the state, but that would be to wander outside the margins of this blog, so I will not.
But I will point out that it is the individuality that we treasure in the great composers, who are not some herd of white supremacists who can be replaced by fiat with a different herd of diverse composers of color. In both cases it is the individuality that is simply dismissed because the group identity is the generic identity. We listen to Mozart because he is an individual, different from Salieri. We listen to Beethoven because he is an individual, different from Hummel. We listen to Stravinsky because he is an individual different from Anatol Liadov.
The problem with music theory is that it tends to always look for the Universal, the Ideal, the General and to discount the unique and individual as some sort of quirk. So in defining and describing "sonata form" the theorist looks for what is general and generic to all sonata forms, missing the fact that when he has so perfectly defined this form, he will discover to his dismay that none of the movements in sonata form written by Haydn actually fit his model!
Every great work of music is undefinable in the sense that it has an irreducible individuality. The generic form or genre is merely a kind of container or organization within which the individuality flourishes. If all you see is the generic bones, you miss not only the flesh, but the actual soul. This is the problem with music theory in general (quite useful as long as we recognize the limitations) and that of Schenker in particular--Schenker who reduced entire movements to the movement from 3 to 2 to 1 scale degrees.
For an envoi, here is one of Stravinsky's most individual and quirky pieces, Les Noces, based on Russian peasant folk traditions and melodies but which sounds like nothing but Stravinsky:
8 comments:
and vice versa, some of us prefer Clementi and Hummel to Mozart because they wrote music that is more fun. Some of us don't contrast Beethoven and Hummel because they were very different kinds of practicing musicians who interacted with their audiences and patrons in different ways and represented very different traditions of pedagogy that are both equally helpful for the kinds of music-making problems I want to tackle.
In fact, for some of the musical problems I've been interested in solving Hummel is BETTER than Beethoven. I think Haydn is still better than all the above-mentioned but I'm going to move to my case rather than just seem like a troll with what I've just said.
Dana Gooley has written a book on the history of improvisation as practice and aesthetic idea in the 19th century and he pointed out that Hummel was more popular in Beethoven's day by dint of being 1) a formidable improviser 2) having mastered the ability to improvise fantasias based on requesting tunes to play from from audience members. Hummel preserved the kappelmeister practices of his time and filled in for Haydn when Haydn was no longer able to handle his day to day responsibilities. So while I enjoy music by both Beethoven and Hummel I don't regard Beethoven as "individual" in contrast to Hummel. I also find Mozart to be pretty seriously over-hyped. I've found that studying Clementi has been more useful to me than studying Mozart, even if within the realm of canonized composers Mozart is supposed to be "individual" in contrast to Clementi.
I've put it this way in the past but US educators may have a moment where they are subliminally thinking "We kicked European @$$ two world wars in a row so why are we here in 2020 beholden to European canons in music pedagogy when we saved the world?" Nobody in US academia wants to put it so jingoistically most of the time but the underlying perplexity of why SChenker has a role in contemporary music theory can be questioned while not necessarily assuming the canon that post-McClary scholars are creating while questioning canons and canonism is going to be never be made. All teaching creates a canon even on the part of teachers who don't like canons. I'm all in favor of a canon that includes Haydn string quartets and Stevie Wonder songs for myself but the money and clickbait to be made favors a polarity about this stuff
While disagreeing with me in a number of details, I think you are making my larger point that we treasure certain music by certain composers because of its INDIVIDUAL quality.
Re your last paragraph: the US has been struggling ever since WWII to find its feet culturally. There has certainly been huge success in visual arts with painters like Rauschenberg and Rothko, but by no stretch of the imagination has there been any American composer in the first rank. It takes a long, long time to grow a classical music tradition.
I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with the details, exactly, as attempting to refine the nature of the case. If you invoke the standard-issue gods of the 19th century and 20th century canons you open yourself up to reactions that will be stuck on the dead-white men pale-male-stale. By bringing up OTHER dead white male composers who were more popular than the 19th century reception history idols we can open up some room to point out, along the way, that nobody is just going to "cancel Beethoven". The whole point of "cancelling Beethoven" is to put someone else in that vacated space.
I also mentioned Gooley because I'm incubating a post about Gooley's book and a point made in the book is that critical improvisation studies in US musicology have so steered toward Afrological paradigms scholars have neglected the lengthy traditions of improvisation in western European practices. Gooley pointed out that there was a continuous and steady tradition of improvised music across western Europe but it was literally church music where all this improv happened, while improvisation on the concert tour scene began to slowly dwindle away in the wake of arguments against concert improvisation by Robert Schumann.
Which is a way of saying that some post-McClary New Musicology types have been responding to a straw man version of 19th century musical history. I specifically bring up Hummel because he was regarded as the apotheosis of the touring composer-improviser in the early 19th century. Americans who only think of improvisation in music in connection to jazz and try to run with some assumption that jazz "introduced" improvisation that wasn't a norm in "classical music" are not-even-wrong about that aspect of history.
Per Taruskin, Stoner, Hugh Wilford and others who have delved into the history of Cold War US arts policy, I don't think it's quite as simple as saying the United States has not developed its tradition(s) to the point where a first rank composer can emerge. US arts policy as an extension of foreign policy backed a European avant garde and American pop music as a matter of gambits against socialist realism (which wasn't even the "norm" in Soviet music from the Kruschev thaw forward from what I've been able to read over twenty years). I.e. we Americans were busy backing whatever art symbolically flipped the bird to the USSR in terms of avant garde music or promoting American popular styles (and I love Ellington's music so no argument against that, as such).
We Americans were too busy bankrolling European avant garde art to piss off the Soviets during the Cold War period to develop a more coherent domestic policy on the arts in art and music. Mark McGurl's The Program Era suggested that we totally DID have a coherent policy in literature and literary criticism for "creative writing" as an academic field, but in music the post-Webern serialist wing that gave us Carter and Babbitt on the one hand and the aleatory of Cage on the other, these got some support partly through "let's tick off the Soviets". Ian Pace and Franklin Cox have made cases that Taruskin et al inflate the role the CIA played in backing avant garde styles to aggravate the Soviets but I think Taruskin's point still stands. The relevance of the point in a larger arts history was summed up by Philip Jeffery
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/media/philip-jeffery-on-an-american-cultural-agenda
The US dedicated the length of the Cold War to an arts policy that was basically anti-Soviet as an extension of FOREIGN policy so that when the Cold War ended the culture war blew up in part because from LBJ onward the US had not really bothered to define its arts policies in domestic terms, so busy were US policy-makers in defining American arts in Cold War and foreign policy agendas.
Per Jeffery's reference the T. S. Elliot vs William Carlos Williams paradigms, what we may be witnessing in US education might not merely be a "cancel Beethoven" impulse, it might be useful to think of the battle as an intra-Americanist paradigm in which Eliot's Europhile elite/elitist paradigm has given way since the end of the Cold War to a doc williams approach. Since I enjoy work by both poets I don't really see why that "has" to be an either/or but academics can have a long history of wanting an either/or for the sake of publishing talking points.
Yes, we do have to be careful about willy-nilly accepting evaluations and explanations that may be distorted by academic careerism.
One interesting question is whether or not the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich will prove to be as significant and durable as it promised?
Minimalism as a whole movement has been influential and I think that as catalysts within that movement they will be remembered but it's tough to say how "mainstream" their influence will be. I'd probably defer to Kyle Gann's work on minimalist and post-minimalist composers as a reference and Gann has mentioned Leonard Meyer's observation that we have long since entered a poly-stylistic steady-state in contemporary music of which minimalism is simply one option. Meyer made that observation a bit more than fifty years ago.
The break from post-Webern integral serialism is probably going to be more long-lasting than any given minimalist work within that break ... although merely breaking from serialism in itself doesn't ensure anything in itself. George Rochberg broke from serialism into a polystylistic juxtaposition of atonal and tonal gestures in his Caprice Variations and String Quartet No. 3 but ... it's not like Rochberg (whose work and writings I respect even if I don't always dig them) is the bee's knees.
It might be a question, where minimalist movements are concerned, what the music is written FOR. We can't completely avoid the extra-musical and non-musical contexts to which and for which composers write. For instance, some church somewhere can keep performing Arvo Part's Berliner Mass a century from now because liturgical choral music is likely to have a place. Whether or not Music for 18 Musicians (which I enjoy) is still going to be around will depend on the range of contexts within which it can be performed.
Wenatchee, the question of viable contexts that you raise is really an important one that I rarely think of. I used to try and imagine innovative instrumental combinations because it was "creative" but now I avoid them because you are cutting your own throat as far as potential performances are concerned. Now I write just for very established ensembles where the possibility of performance is high. Right now I am writing a solo piano piece on commission. And there will be innumerable performance possibilities because the globe is just crawling with pianists.
That tends to be true but my experience composing has been that the works that have been filmed or record that I've written may be the farthest out from normal instrumental combos. I got to film my sonata for tuba and guitar twice; a guitarist filmed my sonata for banjo and guitar a few years ago; and Daniel Estrem recorded my sonata for ukulele and guitar before deciding he liked my work enough to record all 24 of my preludes and fugues for solo guitar as guitar duets through Magnatune. So you can write for chamber ensemble combos that can seem insane by normal orchestral conventions if you know musicians willing to tackle them.
But both your experience and mine could be summed up in a proverb my instrumentation and orchestration teacher gave me years ago in college, "Write for the musicians and resources you DO have, not the ones you WISH you had."
It doesn't hurt to go to Sheer Pluck to plug in combos to see how many people have written for a combination, too. There "is" a small body of tuba/guitar literature I didn't realize existed until I looked, but it's a grain of sand compared to the beach that is flute/guitar rep. :)
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