musical discoveries

[calimac]

In my current listening, I've just discovered a passage by Schubert - Schubert! - that sounds uncannily like Philip Glass. I couldn't be more astonished if I tried. The instrumentation is right too: strings and organ, with soft creepy voices. I think it's from Satyagraha or Koyaanisqatsi. Franz, you didn't tell me you were a minimalist.

Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:

But while bad 17th-century music is merely dull and bad 19th-century music is tediously grandiose, the late 20th century's bad music was pervasively ugly, pretentious, and meaningless, yet backed up by a technical apparatus that justified it and even earned it prestigious awards. Twelve-tone technique - the South Sea Bubble of music history, to which hundreds and perhaps thousands of well-intended composers sacrificed their careers like lemmings, and all for nothing - brought music to the lowest point in the history of mankind. Twelve-tone music is now dead, everyone grudgingly admits, yet its pitch-set-manipulating habits survive in far-flung corners of our musical technique like residual viruses.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

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

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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."

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

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.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

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.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

> 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.