calimac

And yet, and yet, in the hands of a core group, whom increasing numbers of people damn for their imitators, serial technique seemed for a while to be such a promising idea. I have no more time than you for the Milton Babbitts of this world, but the delicate tiny works of Webern make me cry with pleasure, when I am in the mood for them, and Pli selon pli touches me deeply in the right hands and I have liked the Stravinsky Movements for Piano and Orchestra since I bought it randomly when I was sixteen.

Yes, it was a delusion, and yes, it was often a tyranny - but there was some gorgeous stuff along the way nonetheless. And let's remember, posterity gets to decide these things and sometimes it takes a couple of centuries to sort it out. I mean, look how Bach's stock dipped and rose, and how Vivaldi's stock is rising.

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There is no musical technique that a sufficiently skilled and sympathetic composer can't use to good effect. In serialism, this was accomplished for me most effectively by the emotional openness of certain works of Berg and Rochberg (ironically - as it was Rochberg who was the most prominent early abandoner of serialism because he felt it was too restrictive for what he had to say - I don't care for his post-serial works).

Gann's ire is directed at the point you acknowledge in passing at the start - that in the post-WW2 era, serialism (which by then had passed out of the hands of its originators and into those of subsequent generations of fanatical cadres) became an academically-imposed hegemony, pushed on composers regardless of what their views would have been without it.

I'm not too impressed with the "if you don't like the answer, kick the can further down the road" school of submitting to the judgment of history. Come on, it's 2010. According to serialist theoretical polemics, we should all be whistling tone rows in the street by now. It hasn't happened, and it's not going to.

As for Bach, his dip in reputation was that undergone by many artists in their late life and/or early posthumous years as surfeit makes them seem old-fashioned. Schoenberg has been dead for nearly 60 years now, and his music is indeed being played more. (Bach was also well on the way to recovery by the equivalent point - Chopin, born 60 years after Bach's death, was trained on Bach, and that was long before Mendelssohn started the Bach revival.) But the respect paid the Second Viennese School doesn't alter the bleakness of the later serialist hegemony.

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I don't know Rochberg all that well except for the violin concerto - I like bits of what I've heard without particularly having a sense of where each of them fits in to his overall career.

You're right up to a point about the judgement of posterity thing - Bach's eclipse was only partial and the revival started earlier than is sometimes thought - and yet it can take longer. Donne was disliked by both the Augustans and the Romantics and only thought of as great in the aftermath of Modernism; posterity appropriates material to serve its own purposes.

Serialism is not going to rule the world at any point - some of the people we currently discard may get revived for other musical purposes is the point I am making. I think we can agree that the historicist claims of serialism were bogus - it was not where music was heading, and it was a dead end. That would remain true even were something unexpected to be pulled out of the wreckage in 2080.

Which is also one of the things about the reputation of Bach - he is a master so huge that he can be appropriated by generation after generation to serve their own turn. The Bach on whom Chopin trained is not the Bach whom Mendelssohn promoted is not the Bach whom Busoni transcribed is not the Bach loved by the modernists and arranged by Schoenberg and Webern is not the Bach orchestrated by Stokowski is not the Bach of the authenticity movement is not the Bach of Glen Gould is not the Bach of operatic divas making that record. Or rather, he is all those things.

Schoenberg is getting his revival which is also his shakedown - obviously it is going to be the big Romantic Schoenberg mostly, but also the concertos and the chamber symphonies. I'd put money on the quartets including the two later ones. Of the hard core serial side of him, I think the Variations, the Violin and Piano fantasy and possibly the wind quintet.

In the end though, I don't like him as much as his pupils and I think he was probably a pretty baleful influence. Music departments in universities got caught up with a lot of bullying and in this country Radio 3 and the Proms were horribly dominated by a clique - I don't think great talents were destroyed by it all but some people did not get patronage that should have done. Yet one of the people most involved with the Radio 3 stuff, and the exclusion of so much good music from the canon, and a lot of verbal spite of the most tedious kind, was Boulez who for me is the one good thing in later modernism.

And of course he was not nearly serial enough for some of them, and what I like about him is often pretty rather than beautiful, which he would doubtless hate.

The thing I think we can agree on is that serialism squashed so much that was good - and we will spend the next decades deciding what petits maitres of C20 are better than we thought.

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"petits maitres," eh? I think they need to be re-evaluated more than that. I still resent Harold Schonberg's condescending statement that Sibelius "deserves to occupy an honorable place among the minor composers." He said that in 1970, when Sibelius was still at the trough of his posthumous dip. Since then, he's been properly recognized as a giant, the greatest symphonist of his generation.

And then Schonberg turns right around and reams out Grove 5 for its condescending remarks about Rachmaninoff! "O would some power the giftie gie us ..."

I may previously have inflicted on you my theory - I call it the Hidden City - that all the arts took a wrong turn into abstruse modernism in the early 20th century, which grew hermetic after WW2, and that only gradually in the last 40 years or so have the true great masters of that century, popular enough but largely critically scorned at the time, have been unearthed and given their just due. In music, look not just at Sibelius (and even Rachmaninoff) but even more Shostakovich, as vs waves of serialism. In literature, Tolkien as vs sterile realism. In architecture, Wright and Morgan as vs Bauhaus and allied schools. And so on.

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I have never understood the attempt to downgrade Sibelius. It isn't that I don't like him, just that I like some of his rivals for the title of greatest symphonist so much more than you that I can't slide a playing card between my love for them. But that is a different conversation which we have had before and on which we are never going to agree...Sibelius produced great work and he also suggested a way forward for art - the whole thing of planting small cells in the early part of work that accumulate to massive statement - that is often productive.

Rachmaninoff's only thoroughly good symphony is the one that doesn't call itself one - the Symphonic Dances. And at that I am not sure I don't prefer the two piano version. He is a good example of the minor composer one would never choose to be without - I listen to the Corelli variations and the second sonata perhaps more often than is good for me.

You haven't explicitly told me about the Hidden City though I had deduced something of the sort from your writing, and it is a theory I am far from dismissing. With the caveat that, for example, Shostakovich's late quartets draw on the sound world of serialism a little and that the relationship is complex. It works for architecture, on the whole, but I am not clear how it works for painting where figurative work never went away. It didn't really happen in poetry - Ashbery and Prynne, and the Black Mountain group, have their advocates but the Movement and the Martians were always more important really.

Also, I am not sure where you would put all sorts of people - where does a novelist like Pynchon fit your model, say?

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My claim of Sibelius as the greatest symphonist of his generation is based on general consent, not my individual judgment. In any case, while I like his work greatly, he's not my favorite in that category. I like Nielsen (selectively) and Vaughan Williams (unselectively) rather more.

The Hidden City never went away in any of the arts, but it was roundly dismissed. I'm not that familiar with painting, but representative art was sneered at by the higher critics - Wyeth, for instance, pushed aside as bourgeois at a time when art galleries were filled with ridiculous non-art. (I've seen Rothko paintings in person, including the famous chapel, and my only reaction was, "You've got to be kidding.")

Serialism is a technique, a notion to put in the toolbox and use selectively where it'd be effective. It's making it an all-encompassing rule in the teeth of all human feeling that's objectionable. So there's nothing wrong with Shostakovich trying a bit of it. But I note that whenever Shostakovich begins a piece with a declaration of "look, I'm being serial!", within a few minutes he forgets all about it and goes back to being Shostakovich.

In terms of the chronological development of the Hidden City, Pynchon sits in literature about where the early minimalists do in music: they come along a bit later, at just about the point where the cracks begin showing in the modernist hegemony, and fill an interest in something different if a bit weird.

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So who does Gann list as the bad serial composers? He's pretty eclectic in his taste and probably doesn't hate 'em all.

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It's not just serialism strictly defined, but what he calls "Uptown" music, i.e. the worshippers of complexity who sitteth at Columbia U and anywhere else from Lincoln Center on up. He frequently uses Boulez and Babbitt and, yes, Carter, as punching bags. His longest single list of composers of well-crafted but forgettable music of that generation also includes Leon Kirchner, Arthur Berger, and George Perle. And he detests Augenmusik:

"I think the basis for the reputation of stuffed shirts like Elliott Carter and Mario Davidovsky is that Uptown critics follow their scores during concerts and find impressive devices, whereas if they relied on their ears they would draw a blank like everyone else."

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I like Boulez, Carter, and Babbitt without the scores in front of me! Chacun a son gout, as they say; we all have different ears.

Full disclosure: Arthur Berger was one of my teachers.

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But can you be impressed by their devices without the scores?

Gann doesn't say that the music is completely unlikable, just forgettable.

"For over four decades they gave us works full of elegant, seamless language, but no images ... convincing but unmemorable. Hundreds of compositions ... made you think, while you listened, 'Wow, this is really well-crafted'; then, 10 minutes into intermission, you couldn't remember a note. These works proved the composer was brilliant but gave the listener nothing to take home."

That precisely describes my one concert experience with Kirchner. I wouldn't give Carter even that much. But the difference may lie in the fact that I'd studied Kirchner's score before the concert, because I was reviewing it; I hadn't looked at Carter's scores.

On the other hand, take a composer whom Gann praises but I don't like much - even Gann admits that "his music sounds like it came from Mars" - Scelsi. In a good performance, I have no trouble grasping what he's getting at, even if it's not the stuff for me, without looking at the score at all. In fact, like the minimalists', Scelsi's scores don't tell you very much that you can't hear right off the bat. That, of course, is anathema to the Uptown aesthetic.

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I'm impressed by (and like) the music, whether or not I can follow all of the devices without the score or program notes. Is "being impressed by their devices without the scores" a requirement for musical quality and memorability?

The majority of people who listen to classical music don't hear and can't describe much of what's going on, device-wise, in music that is a lot more technically obvious than Carter, Babbitt, and Boulez - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Wagner. They don't necessarily hear what's going on, though they might with more practice and help.

One example. I have a friend I'd consider a careful listener, a person who has sung in choruses and listened to classical music throughout his life. I pointed out a particular thematic recurrence in Tristan to him and he was all, boy, I wish I'd heard that. He loves Wagner, too.

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I'd say that intelligent but untutored listeners can hear what's going on in great music and distinguish it from the non-great, they just can't always identify it. As a listener with limited technical chops myself, I rely on that fact to form my critical judgments.

In any case, no art worth experiencing more than once reveals all its secrets on the first or even the first several encounters. That's not what Gann and I are talking about here. Gann doesn't use the term "Augenmusik" as far as I noted, and I didn't invent the term. Music that reveals its construction and secrets, however quickly or slowly, to the eye and not to the ear is a well-known and well-attested phenomenon - Gann more than once cites an unnamed pro-Carter scholar who admits as much about Carter's music.

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> intelligent but untutored listeners can hear what's going on > in great music and distinguish it from the non-great

Some, not all. Depends on what you mean by "intelligent" and what listening skills that encompasses.

Curious about who the unnamed pro-Carter scholar might be and why he's not named. Maybe elsewhere in the book his/her identity is revealed.

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