Sunday, April 23, 2006
A discipline that leads nowhere is a dead discipline
"Difficulty is desirable . . . canned, reliable difficulty." (Robert Pinsky)
I like Pinsky's observation; it is insightful and rich with implications: I propose that difficulty (understood as complexity), in itself, is in no way responsible for the current predicament classical music finds itself in. But I would also like to draw your attention to the use of the word reliable, which I read as a function of context. It suggests that the nature of the difficulty -its context- is more significant than its degree.
I ask: Why has "art" music lost so much of its capacity to excite new audiences? Why does "art" music in general have so little relevance in our culture?
The past is always interpreted through the context of the present. Unless new art music is perceived as a vibrant experience, there can be no other destiny for old art music than the museum. A discipline that leads nowhere is a dead discipline.
So we must look at new art music for an answer to those questions. If it is not "complexity" that is responsible for our failure to communicate effectively to a lay audience, then what is?
One possible explanation would be that the "surface" of our music all too often has no contact with the sound world of every day experience. There are very few "entry points" for lay audiences to undertake the adventure of new music with us. An essential aspect of concert music is "process" (unfolding): simple ideas that evolve into complex narratives over periods of time. Its fundamental nature is developmental (yes I know, do not cut my throat, there are exceptions). But, by and large, it is music that is more concerned with unfolding a narrative than with projecting a sound world. Yet, a fundamental requirement to achieve an effective narrative is that we (the lectores) relate to the “characters” in the story. I suggest that new art music finds it hard to connect with an audience, largely because what happens during its unfolding happens to characters our audiences no longer recognize or relate to.
This was not always the case. Throughout much (though not all) of its history, art music dealt with musical materials derived from dance forms. This afforded audiences an entry point into the more complex narratives of learned music. What "happened" over the course of a composition happened to patterns, rhythms and melodies that most people were familiar with.
A very efficient balance was achieved during the baroque period when that which developed was mostly taken from the dance practice of the day and then transformed into dense polyphonic works. Yet, however complex those structures became, they never completely lost touch with their dance origins. My brother likes to point out how an 18th century listener confronted with Bach’s monumental Chaconne for solo violin -a piece that was never intended as a dance- would have felt at home from the very first bar because he had indeed previously danced to a simpler, non-developmental, version of its basic rhythm: the move from the dance floor to the music room had followed a more or less continuous path.
But today, even after post-modernism, new music is still being discussed in terms of its "surface" syntax. Technically speaking, the one meaningful aspect of “music as art” that is essentially different from “music as entertainment” is "process": the ability to arrive -after a long journey- to a different place from where it starts. Popular music, by and large, is non-developmental. One can start listening to a "track" from more or less any point in it. One can hear it in the background or in the foreground, drift away and come back to it without getting lost. This is mostly because it will not unfold into new directions over time.
Once the song proper has been defined (usually after an intro), the sound world will remain constant (this is true even for those pieces that are not songs). This univocal aspect of popular music carries both strength and a limitation: the emotional power afforded by stability is achieved by abandoning any possibility to go beyond an already conjured sound world (but note that this is not experienced as a limitation within the system because it is quite consistent with the music's function). Serious art music, on the other hand, often proposes a narrative of radical transformation. If we are going to make sense of its discourse we are to remain hostage: it demands our unconditional attention from beginning to end. You cannot just “land” at any arbitrary point. So the meaningful difference between the genres is in their ultimate aims.
This is why we should never make the complexity of the local syntax -the surface- our main focus of attention. And yet, it remains so; and composers continue to struggle with an issue of only secondary importance while the ship is sinking. At the same time, more or less fringe elements in popular culture (such as "trance", "lounge" and "electronica") have introduced new levels of abstraction into their discourse opening an important door there. What is it that young composers of Western art music can bring into that equation that would be of significance? It seems to me that there are many ways of extending their practices while retaining the "entry points": using developmental techniques, juxtapositions, multi-temporal rhythmic structures and discontinuity of form, while creating large-scale narratives that unfold in an immediate yet non-repetitive manner. Perhaps there is a golden opportunity here for a new generation of "serious" composers to recapture an audience their 20th century precursors so cavalierly lost.
Who knows . . .
posted by Ezequiel Viñao
4:22 PM
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