source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 09:18:32 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: RATED NC-17: ALL COMPOSERS OVER AGE 17 MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY THE GHOST OF JOHN CAGE --- "Modernism is now being seriously challenged for the first time in almost a century or more. Which, considering the really awful degree of narcissism, nihilism, inanity and self-indulgence that late modernism has allowed itself, is probably the best thing that could happen to it. What has been permanently lost is the sense of the absolute that the modernist movement once gave to its loyal followers. And to that we can say: good riddance. We are none of us now--either artists or critics or the public--quite as susceptible as we once were to the idea that at a given moment in time, history ordains that one and only one style, one vision, one way of making art or one way of thinking about it, must triumph and all others be consigned to oblivion." [Kramer, Hilton, The New York Times, 28 March 1982, Section 2, pg. 32] Most awful of all modernist excesses, naturally, are those perpetrated by John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Of course everyone already knows this. There's no controversy about it. The facts have long since been admitted in those code phrases so beloved of the New York critical establishment. When TIME magazine (in its Cage obit, 1 November 1993, pg. 87) oozes: "There was always the whiff of the charlatan about John Cage," we all know what they REALLY mean. ("Cage was a con artist without a shred of musical talent.") They just don't want to come right out and *admit* it because (after all) it would prove embarrassing to explain why so many New York critics kow-towed to Cage for so many years. And when Roger Reynolds oohs and ahhs in an interview-cum-suck-up with the Great Mountebank,"Your main contribution has been to expand the idea of what it is reasonable to do in music," we all know what Reynolds is *really* saying: "John Cage gave audiences the musical equivalent of a golden shower for 40 years." Of course, Reynolds doesn't want to come right out and actually *say* that. "Epater le bourgeoisie" doesn't go over too well in the land of Oprah and Geraldo unless you sugar-coat the pill. And thus, while we all know and covertly admit that John Cage was a stunt man whose musical fame is conducive to an understanding of how the Egyptians could have worshipped insects...even so, none of us really want to *admit that.* This is peculiar, especially on a microtonal discussion forum like this one. After all, Cage's early prepared- piano works flirted with the edges of the 12-tone equal tempered scale. It's hard to say that Cage's early prepared piano pieces are in any particular tuning-- least of all 12--and certainly the "Imaginary Landscape" for radios skirted the idea of departing from 12 via electronic sounds. Naturally, none of these early gimmicks provoked enough critical attention: and so stunt man Cage was obliged to find some really TALL buses over which to jump his musical Evel Kneival act. 4 minutes 33 seconds...a burning piano...whatever. The end result, naturally, was that pathetic orgy of gimmickry, fetishism and sheer silliness that characterized Cage's so-called "musical" output post-1948. And so, instead of doing something to advance music, he vanished into the tarpit of "narcissism, nihilism, inanity and self-indulgence" so aptly described by Kramer. Boulez is a different story. While Cage displayed dazzling early sparks of musical talent in his "Three Constructions" and his prepared piano pieces only to throw away his abilities in favor of a career scamming the gullible (the compositional equivalent of L. Ron Hubbard's reign as Dianetics guru), Boulez never betrayed any such rudiments of compositional talent. Boulez's music created a tremendous impression in the 1950s--until people actually heard it. Thereafter, his popularity dropped off sharply. To be sure, Boulez's "acknowledged masterworks" (acknowledged by the other dry-as-dust theorists, all of whose judgments and compostions are now equally inconsequential and outdated) sound pretty, albeit in an inoffensive Muzak-y sort of way... Boulex had a gift for orchestration. But after about 5 minutes of "Le Marteau sans Maitre," or "Pli Selon Pli," you realize it's just warmed-over Webern with a Chet Baker arrangement. Why listen to a pale imitation? Why drink from the toilet, instead of the tap? Why listen to Boulez when the original-- and much more interesting--Chet Baker is available on CD? To say nothing of Webern. All told, it's a shame that Boulez had no compositional talent, nor any original ideas. Because in the early 1950s Boulez (unlike Cage) actually thought seriously and at length about microtonality: "In considering his electronic means, the composer has first to free himself from the conception of absolute interval. This can certainly be done. The tempered system of twelve equal semi-tones seems to lose its necessity at the very moment at which it passes from chromatic organization to the Series. There have already been experiments with intervals of less than a semi-tone: of uarter-, third- and even sixth-tones. (...) In fact, to select a fundamental unit other than the semi-tone, means to conceive a kind of temperament peculiar to a single composition; all intervals are to be heard as derviing from this fundamental tempering, thus affecting the listener's conditions of perception. (...) This tempering may take place within the octave...or, it is equally possible to construct in such a way that the interval with which the demarche of the scale commences in other than the octave. (...) In this way it would be possible to derive from one structure based on wide intervals, i.e., having a wide compass and a semi-tone as the unit, a corresponding structure based upon micro-intervals, in which the compass would be greatly reduced and where the unit would be either a very small interval or irregular intervals defined by a series. [Boulez, P., "At the End of Fruitful Lands..." Die Reihe, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1955: English translation 1957] Alas, such ideas would have resulted in an actual *expansion* of available musical resources... And that could not be permitted. Like rock music, the modernist avant garde was always a fanatically reactionary cult cloaked in the image of a revolutionary vanguard. Any *real* emancipation of the dissonance leading to a break with the sacred 12 tones would have thrown into disarray the whole Tammany Hall-style patronage system of orchestras, conductors, concert halls, the Beaux Arts, circle-jerk New York music critics, and the rest of the corrupt musical machine. Without the Tammany Hall of 12 equal tones per octave, those who benefited from the patronage system of the Sacred 12 Tones (like Boulez, who now makes megabucks recycling tired 12-equal dribs and drabs as a conductor) would find themselves out of a job. Boulez on a street corner? Begging for dimes? Holding up a sign WILL CONDUCT IN 12 FOR FOOD??? Ye gods. Such could not be permitted. Thus, after flirting with tdea of actually breaking free of his pathological dodecaphilia, Boulez threw in the towel and made the obligatory obeisance to the Sacred 12 Tones. The result was predictable: "Just as Marxist-Leninist thought led to forms of government meant to remedy the excesses supposedly caused by the exhaustion of capitalism, so Schoenbergian- Boulezian practice was touted as the alternative to an exhausted system called `tonality.' These attempts to revolutionize, respectively, our economic and musical worlds had several other things in common besides the Germanic origin. The application or enactment of both ideologies required that their alternatives--and those who would support them--be publicly denounced and discredited, and a form of double-speak was employed in support of these `revolutionary' ideas. The apologists writing in Pravda held sway in support of a failing system in the same way that Herbert Eimert, Milton Babbitt, and Charles Wuorinen dominated the pages of Die Reihe and Perspectives of New Music for many years. What is so interesting is the suddenness with which these applications of science--some have said pseudo-science--to economics and music have been rejected and are now seen as merely interesting experiments that failed because they denied basic human realities: economic and cultural diveristy in the political realm and the necessity for perceptual forms of organization and the power of intuitive processes in the world of music." [Appleton, Jon, "Machine Songs III: Music In the Service of Science--Science in the Service of Music," Computer Music Journal, vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 17-21] Which leaves us back where we started. Now that everyone has tacitly admitted that Cage and Boulez were mere pimples on the rear end of 20th century music, it's time to look around for a new graven idol. The next Great Composer (now that we've realized that the most famous so-called "Great Composers" of the 1950s didn't produce anything of lasting interest)...akin to the Next Great Rock Star. In both cases the focus is the same: keep the rubes gawking, wow 'em with glitter and glitz, dazzle 'em with music videos & half-naked girls (or, in the case of prestigious New Music Journals, ritzy- looking hypercomplex diagrams and equations) and hit 'em with jargon....anything to keep the rubes from realizing that it's all just a dog and pony show. (Meanwhile, the REAL great composers like Nancarrow, Risset, Chowning, et alii, go all but unnoticed and all but remarked.) And so the focus in new music has again turned toward the cheery cherub with the cheekiest charts, the wildest word-count, the most scrumptious- looking (read: indecipherable) scores: Namely, Ferneyhough. This is an interesting aberration, and it spotlights one of the deepest ruts into which post- modernist music has fallen. Namely, the obsession with *intellectualizing* music. Why do Western composers and critics and music theorists so fanatically chart and diagram and plot out and schematize modern compositions? Primarily (one suspects) in order to justify the long-held euroschlock "doctrine that Western European art music is superior to all other music of the world," which "remains a given, a truism. Otherwise intelligent and sophisticated scholars continue to the use the word `primitive' when referring to the music of Africa, American Indians, aboriginal Australians, and Melanesians, among others." [Becker, Judith, "Is Western Art Music Superior?" Musical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 2, 1986, pg. 341] Yo! Western composers and performers might not be able to produce rhythms as complex as those of the Balinese gamelan, or tunings as subtle as those used in the sub-Saharan ugubhu, or to move audiences as deeply as do the "weeping" pitches of Kaluli gisalo songs, but...hey! At least *we* euro-dudes can ALWAYS come up with bigger, better, more impressive *charts* of our compositions than any other musical culture on earth! (A typically priapic male obsession. "Mine is bigger than yours..." My compositional diagram, that is. No wonder there are so few famous women composers. Can anyone imagine a *woman* wasting 6 months of her life straight-edging a bunch of chicken-scratches that explain something everyone can already *hear*???) Thus the bizarre and otherwise incomprehensible elevation of such duffers as Ferneyhough...whose scores are, indeed, quite impressive--as grafitti. Indeed, nary a subway train in New York or a wall in South Central L.A. is as crammed with in-group jargon and chock-a-block with meaningless verbiage as one of Ferneyhough's articles. (In fact one very prominent member of this tuning forum laughed out loud while perusing one of Ferneyhough's ludicrous "Perversions of New Music" articles, chuckling: "Looks like the guy follows the same aesthetic when writing as when composing... Or should one say, the same lack thereof?" NO, folks, it wasn't this little lad, but someone much better known.) This teaches an important lesson to microtonalists: if ya wanna get famous, ya gotta make diagrams. 1/1 has made a start at this--ratio-space charts look impressive, and to infants or the mentally retarded or the average new music doyen they'll doubtless exert an irresistable attraction. Baby go goo-goo at pwetty pitchah! Of course, this is the Motown approach to popularizing microtonality. According to this guerilla strategy (practiced extensively in New York), the objective is a "crossover" composition that "breaks through" into the white male New York critical establishment. As with the de-funked un-gotten-down R&B of Motown records, all potentially controversial and threatening aspects of the music must be shaved off and polished away, leaving a bland whitebread generic product sufficiently "mainstream" to attract a mass audience. And while the New York composers/performers represent the Motown approach to microtonality, those of us on the West Coast represent the Stax approach. "F*** 'em!" is the West Coast philosophy with regard to the New York critical establishment: if they can't stand the microtonal heat, let 'em flee the concert hall. This alternative approach to popularizing microtonality relies on the rasty nasty snazzy sound of strange intervals and unfamiliar musical forms to attract the adventurous concert-goer and CD buyer. While the New York crowd blows dust off musty scores like Dick Stein's 1906 1/4-tone cello piece for a concert at Juilliard, the West Coast crowd blasts the audience with full-bore hard-core microtones from the git-go in exotic tunings like 13-TET and 13-limit JI and harmonic series 1-60. Each approach has its merits. Stax or Motown, both seem to attract their share of "mainstream" "crossover" audience from standard bland 12. Regardless of the approach, it remains an unfortunate fact that "I have learned that if I produce a complex structural diagram of a piece of music from anywhere, the students will listen to the piece more carefully and will regard it with greater respect. A structural diagram gives the music a legitimacy it does not have without the analysis." [Becker, Judith, "Is Western Art Music Superior?" Musical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No 2, 1986, pg. 346.] So here's a helpful suggestion: when giving lectures or concerts, microtonalists should project an overhead transparency of the New York subway system and throw in some gibberish about "pitch class matrices" and "all-interval sets" and "maximally symmetric stochastic distributions." This will wow the eurogeeks and ensure that the microtonal music is listened to with *great* attention. After all, it requires hardly *any* skill or intelligence to perpetrate this kind of musico- theoretic scam, and the rewards are VAST...as Cage and Boulez have so amply demonstrated. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 6 Nov 1995 19:21 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA25588; Mon, 6 Nov 1995 09:21:02 -0800 Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 09:21:02 -0800 Message-Id: <9511060919.aa20661@cyber.cyber.net> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu