Tuesday, March 15, 2005
walls
I recently heard a quote from Daniel Patrick Monihan (whose name I don't know how to spell) to the effect that one could have one's own opinion, but one couldn't have ones own facts. In Politics lately lots people feel entitled to make their opinions their facts; and I guess elsewhere as well.
I don't understand the idea that academia is either "a large receptive audience" or "a marketing vehicle." Maybe somebody can explain that to me. I also don't understand this evil wall (of what---exclusivity?) which is being maintained by Boulez and Carter and Babbitt. If the New York Philharmonic is your yard stick, it's hard for me to believe that they have performed Babbitt more than they have Steve Reich (or at all, since Relata II about 30 years ago). (And that story about the Bernstein 3rd Symphony, according to Arthur Berger, one of the people who was there,is completely false; he said he lost interest once it got to be twelve-tone.) Also, surely it's out of academia, not in it, where Pierrot Lunaire is considered modern. (I agree that that's a ludicrously sad situation, but if that's the case in academia, maybe somebody needs to explain what that means to me as well.)
As far as I can tell Kyle Gann is talking about a pretty specific type of music when he's talking about Downtown music. It seems that Galen is using the term in a much more wide ranging way, by which time it's clear that it doesn't mean Babbitt, but it's hard to tell beyond that exactly what it might mean. In any case, I'm not so sure that "downtown music," whatever that means, is so terribly descriminated about or neglected. In fact if you consider in these days what's the kind of music that's the most likely to be derided in any music school, or anywhere else, for that matter, surely it would be twelve-tone music. Other than that it seems like just about anything goes.
Just to point out: Boulez, Carter, and Babbitt are all still very much alive, and working, pretty quietly and, at least in the case of Carter and Babbitt, aren't welding all that much power (any more, anyway, if they ever did--they're much too concerned with just writing their music). I don't quite get lumping all three of them together, since Boulez seems to me to be very different from the other two in style and outlook and just about every other way, but never mind. Certainly nobody's saying these days (these days being for the last twenty-five years of so) that the way of any of the three of them was the only way, or even the best way (if they ever did), and I don't see anybody clinging to the idea now. In that sense this all seems like fighting a battle that's already been decided. But that way is one way. They're all three serious and sincere and skillful composers and they deserve their due as that. None of them is an enormous powerful force standing in the way of anything. Making them out to be is, as near as I can make out, either setting them up as some sort of straw men to bash and knock down or the product of some kind of paranoia verging on the dillusional.
None of us thinks our music gets played enough or is reaching the wide audience that would adore it if those terrible academics (or those terrible faux-downtown composers or those terrible minimalists, or those terrible anything elses) weren't standing in their way. And none of us who doesn't have a job doesn't think we deserve one. But I don't see that beating up on some style or other does anything constructive.
The situation we're all facing go so far beyond styles and cliques. The number of people in the world who are interested in any kind of classical music at all (name it: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Monteverdi, Percy Grainger, even, for that matter Tschaikovsky and Rachmaninoff) in any little way--or seem to be able to make any thing out of it-- at all is so small. Of them, my guess is that most of them would find Reich or Glass to be heavy sledding, not to mention La Mont Young. The problems are problems of general music education. There's also a commercial aspect of it--like it seems to be harder to buy and sell than Kenny G or Wayne Newton or Kid Rock, but that's way beyond my understanding of things. That problem is keeping all of us, whatever kind of music we write, from reaching the massive audiences we would all like to get to. John Harbison told me a while ago that when he started teaching at MIT he could be sure that practically every student he would come in contact with would have heard a Beethoven Symphony, but that for a while now he couldn't count on it. My experience as a teaching assistant in big lecture general music classes in the core program at Harvard is pretty much the same. When the cream of the crop, high achieving, well educated students at the most elite schools in the country (who are the ones most likely to be the audience that at least in the past we would have been most likely to get to) find just about any kind of classical music to be strange and inaccessible, then we're all in trouble (which we are), and it's not the fault of Milton Babbitt or Pierre Boulez.
posted by Rodney Lister
6:11 PM
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