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music in time of war
Mar. 16th, 2010 03:53 pmIn last week's review, I got in a few digs at the past serialist hegemony, or "modern music racket" if you prefer plain language. I find it endlessly amusing that, in the past thirty years or so, composers who had once been the most extreme modernists have been discovering the joys of consonance and coherence in music, the inverse of the previous thirty years when composers who had once been populists were taking up serialism and other forms of academic modernism. "Bottom rail on top this time," as the ex-slave Union soldier remarked when among the prisoners he was guarding in 1865 he found his former master.
The only difference is that composers who stick with modernism today, like Elliott Carter, will not be subject to the kind of obloquy that greeted composers who stuck with tonalism in the 1960s, like Samuel Barber. It's OK with me if people write music I don't like, so long as they don't go around declaring the "historical necessity" for it. I don't go around declaring the historical necessity for minimalism and neo-romanticism, though I could; and I'm glad they exist.
In this week's review, though, I didn't bury into the subject of music as a response to war, though that was the shared theme of the selections. There was enough to say about the performances without that. None of these works were searing, not even Janacek's Violin Sonata of which the composer said, "I could just about hear the sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head." To the outside listener it's not as grim as that makes it sound. And Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is a call of faith in the midst of extremity, not an agonized depiction of combat.
Still, there's a common assumption in the last century that tough times require tough music, and some of it really is that tough. Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is no picnic, and, moving from war to disease, Corigliano's First Symphony is a cry of despair over the AIDS crisis.
But times have always been tough, and music hasn't always seen fit to reflect that. Beethoven lived through a foreign army actually invading his city, which was particularly hard for him on his ailing ears, but it didn't have any obvious toughening effects on his music. Indeed, his explicit war depiction, Wellington's Victory, is cheerful to the point of goofiness. (You have probably never heard this. You aren't missing much.) Where's the grimness of music in response to the very grim wars of the 17th and 18th centuries? The answer is, the purpose of music wasn't considered then to be a reflection of human agonies, as it was later. I'd need a refuel on my massive generalizer to go on further than that, but the line of reasoning may easily be imagined.
The only difference is that composers who stick with modernism today, like Elliott Carter, will not be subject to the kind of obloquy that greeted composers who stuck with tonalism in the 1960s, like Samuel Barber. It's OK with me if people write music I don't like, so long as they don't go around declaring the "historical necessity" for it. I don't go around declaring the historical necessity for minimalism and neo-romanticism, though I could; and I'm glad they exist.
In this week's review, though, I didn't bury into the subject of music as a response to war, though that was the shared theme of the selections. There was enough to say about the performances without that. None of these works were searing, not even Janacek's Violin Sonata of which the composer said, "I could just about hear the sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head." To the outside listener it's not as grim as that makes it sound. And Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is a call of faith in the midst of extremity, not an agonized depiction of combat.
Still, there's a common assumption in the last century that tough times require tough music, and some of it really is that tough. Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is no picnic, and, moving from war to disease, Corigliano's First Symphony is a cry of despair over the AIDS crisis.
But times have always been tough, and music hasn't always seen fit to reflect that. Beethoven lived through a foreign army actually invading his city, which was particularly hard for him on his ailing ears, but it didn't have any obvious toughening effects on his music. Indeed, his explicit war depiction, Wellington's Victory, is cheerful to the point of goofiness. (You have probably never heard this. You aren't missing much.) Where's the grimness of music in response to the very grim wars of the 17th and 18th centuries? The answer is, the purpose of music wasn't considered then to be a reflection of human agonies, as it was later. I'd need a refuel on my massive generalizer to go on further than that, but the line of reasoning may easily be imagined.
