I hate the word AESTHETIC.

I really latched on to the reading by Morton Feldman as soon as he used the word "aesthetic". In relation to new composers emerging at the time of this interview, 1964, Feldman denounces many peers as "revisionists", simply and endlessly going on a crusade for political reasons behind their composition, yet denying the aesthetic.

"Remember that 'revisionists' do not see chance as an aesthetic. They see it as a process they must "humanize" and present in a very portentous technical fashion. This is, of course, done without aesthetic goals in mind."

The issue I take with this is almost as simple as the nomenclature that Feldman chooses. (I'll explain in a minute!) Later, he speaks about why music is stuck running in place: "The reason music is ailing is because everyone is still following the same historical process..."

Of course I agree with you, Morton! Music is stuck in place with every new performance of Beethoven 5 each year (no worries, I love Beethoven 5). However, many young composers likely do feel the need to adapt to this mold (in which tonality, non-chance procedures, etc.) for many reasons; financial and employment security, popularity, the list would go on and on.
Yet I think audience's perception of aesthetic is one of the most prevailing reasons that music is still being held back. If people walked out of Lincoln Center humming and buzzing about a new piece by Thomas Adès, instead of simply saying "Well it was a nice opener, but I don't really remember liking it", perhaps we might be on the right track. But all too often, Adès and his composer comrades are not exactly the aesthetic that audiences look for.

I even see this in my close friends; After class last week I went up to them, very excited about our discussion about Babbitt and showed them a page from a score. The conversation lasted about 1 minute, and went exactly like this:

Me: "Guys, look how crazy these rhythms are! I would have to spend so much time working out these nested rhythms before even attempting to play this. So mathematical!"
Friend x: "Looks like saxophone music to me, haha!" [the piece was for clarinet]
Me: "Well did you know Babbitt had no real concern for his audience? He was a pretty ego-centric dude and felt his music was so advanced that the audience couldn't appreciate it anyway"
Friend x: "Alyssa, that's how all twentieth century music is. They don't care about anyone." (Walks away)

Friend y: "Well he's kinda right, generally that's how a lot of that a tonal music is and how the composers felt".

Cue: My jaw hitting the floor, walking away defeated and flabbergasted.
End scene

______

I'm kind of ashamed that these musician friends actually have generalized over 110 years of music into a single group, and openly admit that they have no care for their audiences.
And I have thought about it non-stop since last week: Why do they feel this way? Is it because they have learned in such an "academic" way, just like Feldman denounced? Is it because they have not had the proper education? I don't think these are any of the answers, but all I could focus upon was that they could read, understand and perform this music, but simply wanted something a little more singable.

So why do I hate the word aesthetic? Because it's vague, meaningless and an opportunity to 'cop out' when you're trying to decide exactly why you don't like that piece by Cage or Babbitt (e.g."Oh well I can't really appreciate the aesthetic...") Feldman uses it to characterize the new movement of chance music beginning since the 50's, while simultaneously denouncing the work of new composers that does not accept willingly these new and radical aesthetics that the "New York School" was creating (also a vague term, as Feldman notes). Yet composers will and have become successful more radical and less revisionists; now we need to work on the audiences and performers.

When attempting to relate John Cage to other musicians and artists that may have been influenced by his thoughts, composition and music of chance. The first artist that immediately came to mind was Jackson Pollack.

A couple months ago I had the absolute pleasure of going to MoMA in New York (I say this entirely seriously; I love MoMA). Starting from the top floor down, my boyfriend and I perused the works starting chronologically. Around floor 7 of 8 we encountered none other than Jackson Pollack. Prior to this I had tried my best explaining to him a little art history and it seemed to help latch on to a rather unfamiliar medium for him. When Pollack came up, he pleaded "Alyssa, what the hell does this even mean?", and I was speechless. I didn't know what to say to describe Pollack's works, other than I knew they were typically completed using the 'drip' method, a technique that is very chance related.

So upon looking into Mr. Pollack's works, I found a quote from an interview with the artist, describing how he goes about 'composing' his works:

"My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.......When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

I saw the importance of his frame of mind similar to that of a performer working on the music of Cage. When performing Cage, you are not fully aware of every sound or silence that occurs until you become more acquainted with the music and truly allow yourself to "live in" it. This can be also true of any piece of music really, but often such care in performance is dismissed quickly.

More important, at least in this story, is the audience's role in the music or artwork. Pollack gave his works traditional names, but gave up this practice in favor of a simple numbering system. He said he wished the audience to,"...look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for."
Perhaps those who have trouble appreciating art like Pollack's or music like Cage's bring a certain expectation to viewing and listening...and that expectation is, ironically, that there should be an expectation for the audience in the first place! (Read that aloud to assist in syntax, it sounds so strange!). Much like my experience at MoMA, he was trying to fit Pollack's painting into a framework of familiarity, just how the artist would not like it!

Another short point I found ironic was that Pollack favored numbering to allow the art to speak for itself to the all-important audience, but rather a self-centered egomaniac like Babbitt felt there was so much meaning in a title and often gave descriptive titles that were allegedly supposed to evoke the piece ("The Joy of More Sextets, Sheer Pluck", etc.). Even though Babbitt didn't consider his audience to be of any importance, he still went through the process of picking evocative titles. Yes, it draws me in, but does it allow the listener to form their own framework of the music?" Luckily I don't feel as though Cage succumbs to the "catchy title train" and therefore allows the music to speak for itself far more than with a contrived title.

I will leave you with Pollack's painting, "No. 5 (1948)".



I won't tell you what I see; wouldn't want to give you any kind of pre-concieved notions!

When I was 16 I decided that it would be my life's journey and purpose to become an advocate for new music. When you're in high school and the most advanced repertoire you'd conquered is the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, there's a lot of room to grow into.

I began my process by searching for books by contemporary composers on Amazon.com and using my parent's credit card to purchase "Silence", by John Cage. I opened the package with glee to find a fresh new perspective on music, and to begin my journey towards being a hyper-educated music snob. I read the first three pages: "Why does this guy use so many spaces? What kind of format is this? This is really like a stream-of-conciousness".

Well, young Alyssa, you didn't know anything about Cage, his music, or perhaps most importantly his influence on music to come. So in the same naive fashion, I recently did a google search in an effort to seek out other art forms that had been inspired, whether directly or indirectly by Cage. To my luck, I stumbled upon the website Art by Chance, in which they host a festival of "ultra short films". These films, usually less than 45 seconds, embrace a central theme; for 2011 it was "Change". I perused several of these films in search of how the "chance" factor influences their ultra short time frame.

I'd like to highlight two of the films that appear highly influenced by Cage's work.
First, Bulgarian director Dimo Petrov Trifonov created the ultra short film "Primitive (Love)" about “Primitive shapes represent the feeling of love with motion.” I felt this strongly correlated with Cage's dedication to Zen Buddhism, as well as his studies of music of eastern cultures (ex. India). This video represents primal looking shapes that appear to fuse with it's opposite shape. I could see this as a genuine melting of eastern and western music, or the eastern influence on Cage's music.

ARTBYCHANCE2011 - Primitive (Love) from ART BY CHANCE on Vimeo.

The Second video, Nina Peter from Germany presents a portrait of a shirt falling out of a tall apartment window, and documents its flight in the film "Breathe In/Out?". The unedited/doctored film shows the shirt breath. What truly made a huge connection to cage was Peter's description “In a dance-like movement, a shirt falls from a 4th-floor window - and, finally lying on the ground, begins to "breathe". There is no sound - the sound of one's own breathing becomes the soundtrack while watching.”
While the audience and viewers essentially become the backdrop of this ultra short film is completely created music of chance and the silence and breathing is very Cage-eqsue to me. You decide for yourself:

ARTBYCHANCE2011 - Breathe In / Out from ART BY CHANCE on Vimeo.

What was he thinking? Music as Machine

We discussed last week how the not-so-late Karlheinz Stockhausen was interviewed as calling the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as "art" or "beauty".

I couldn't shake this from my mind as I read the articles and readings over the weekend, and noticed a slight mention in Gann's chapter about the reception of Milton Babbitt's music, and just how he felt about it.

Gann glazes over the article published by Babbitt in 1959 called "Who Cares If You Listen?", saying that the article was often taken out of context and may have done more hurt to Babbitt's career than he could recover from. I was somewhat shocked to read that Babbitt did not consider that not only his music, but music in general had the ability to communicate emotionally with an audience or performer. As an advocate for atonal, serialist, and most new works in general, I was truly disappointed. Why? I feel as though connecting these rarer and newer works to the audience on an emotional level is the biggest tool that composers and performers have to create an effective, memorable and learning performance experience. But that's just my opinion; back to Babbitt.

So Babbitt is both a mathematician and a musician, yes? Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? We are getting in to some dangerous territory here, looking to define either field, but it's not totally necessary. When I read "Who Cares If You Listen", I did not at all sense that Babbitt was apathetic towards his music, or felt strongly that it didn't have emotional worth. What I brought away from his writings was this:
Math, science and technology progress, and it is expected, assumed and normal for this to occur. Music and composition, however, is stuck in a gear around the turn of the century, and resists moving forward into the new techniques and developments.

Babbitt's main tenants of the issue are as follows:
Efficiency: The new language of serialist (or even other 20th century techniques) composers is far more efficient, not necessary in length or number of 'notes', but in it's lack of redundant repetition, and the availability of new sounds that prevents said redundancy.

Dimensions: the new vocabulary allows new relationships between pitches and also allows pitches to function in entirely new ways that were once 'taboo'. This also makes scores far more detailed and precise for the performer, often resulting in a difficult performance if all and full attention is paid to composer's choices.

This-is-just-an-extension-of-the-old: This idea is quite Schoenbergian in it's thought that serial and atonal techniques are simply evolution, not revolution. If anything the 'revolution' are the techniques in which theorists and scholars have implemented to study this new music. Yet 'new' music is still seen as a deviation of tradition and thus the extended branch from tradition into the 20th century is severed.

Just as machines evolve, so does music. If we were to use the same refrigerators from a century ago, I'm certain we would not be content with the temperature of our milk. So if your musical tastes and understanding are going to be stuck in the era where women can't vote, Who Cares If You Listen to Milton Babbitt.

Does beauty lie in the familiar?

I began reading the article The Abuse of Beauty by taking the author's statements and attempting to make correlations between music and his broader descriptions of beauty in art in general. After a few pages, it was very clear that I should not pigeon hole the text in such a way, but rather allow the author's opinions of the evolution of the definition of art and beauty's role in said definition. (It is also difficult to carry on keeping yourself in one musical-minded frame throughout 23 dense pages!)

It was not until I read a few pages in about human's own insecurities about new and seemingly "avant-garde" techniques in art that make them chastise it for being crude or ugly. "Fry blamed ignorance and unfamiliarity...we will usually apply the word beautiful to those works of art in which familiarity has enabled us to grasp the unity easily."

FAMILIARITY. Buzzword! Collect $200 dollars.

This sent me thinking all the way back to the first days and blogs of the semester, in which we attempted to define what is "Avant-Garde". A large component of personal definitions includes one's own unique environment and pre-disposed experiences that is brought forth when they experience new things. If someone is educated on a more contemporary issue, art form, or musical style, they will know how to appreciate it. Danto states: "I draw attention to the a priori view that the painting in question really was beautiful, if only viewers knew how to look at it".
Without the "aesthetic education" (or for our purposes, musical education), new works can be perceived as confusing, scary, or, god forbid, unfamiliar.

A second point I thought was both thought provoking as well as quite applicable to other disciplines was the intersection of beauty and culture. I wasn't able to put this into a true cultural context until the excerpt: "The point was not to stand in front of the church and gape at its ornamentation, but to enter the church, the beauty being the bait as it so often is in entering into sexual relationships".

The emphasis on beauty and physical attraction is widely debated and protested, especially among women's groups (It's what is on the inside that counts, girls!)
But now I challenge you to google image search for BEAUTY. (Hmm, I thought that word was supposed to be associated with art?) The results?

Not a single image that is not of a female, typically scantily clad or made up in a doll-like fashion. Granted, I will acknolwedge that this little experiment is kind of in a vacuum (and Google searches may not be the most reliable search for looking into beauty in art). However, I think it speaks volumes about what cultures perceive as beautiful (God Bless the USA?)

How does this relate to music? Well if our culture doesn't value Tuvan throat singing, I would be hard pressed to find a group on mildly music educated adults who fall in love with this unique music from wildly different culture. What I mean by this is that If we are ignorant or unaware of other cultural norms and values in music, we cannot dare to call it 'ugly' or uninteresting because we don't appreciate the aesthetic; anything is possible.

Johnston; a Schenker pedigree?

I was very involved in the article by Ben Johnston, Maximum Clarity, and it's insight into links between traditional and modern music with a specific emphasis on intonation.
I especially liked the first analogy to a lens coming into focus, just as true performance comes into focus as intonation becomes exact. I was hoping that this article wouldn't solely focus on the micro-level of intonation, and I was pleased.

Being the theory-minded student that I am, I first was hooked by Johnston's musical "time-scales": Macro-time, normal-time, micro-time. This sparked the thought in my mind: how could this potentially relate to Heinrich Schenker's method of analysis? A major tenant of Schenker's theory is the evidence of appropriate Background, middle-ground and foreground. As Johnston describes, these musical levels in both theories are similar in terms of organized pitches, a second layer of rhythmic ideas and a final layer of small nuances.

Second, Johnston gives an example meant to demonstrate the significance of tonality by describing the drone in traditional Indian music. He connects it to Western music by saying "The tonic in Western music is our nearest equivalent to the drone, but it is not overtly and constantly present, so its function in bringing meaning to all other tonal events is mediated by the network of tonal relationships that make up the fabric of the music, and the tonic serves a s both a point of departure (home) and also as a goal, even if not achieved" I see this as applied to Schenkerian theory as the emphasis on the outermost "form" of music, and how music doesn't ever fully modulate or stray from the tonic (in traditional Western music). The tonic is persistent throughout a Schenker analysis, even if not always present or consistent.

A final similarity is the difference between patters, sequences and repetitions. Johnston notes that a sequence "travels", what Schenker would describe as "Zug" (e.g. quart-zug, 4th sequence)whereas a repetition is static. Schenker did not 'overanalyze' repetitions and take them for significant changes when they are truly static. He did however, acknowledge the importance of sequences, Zug, to allow composition to get from one place to another, still all within the realm of tonic.

A caveat of this comparison is that Schenker's theory was not meant to be applied to contemporary or atonal music by any means (A little elitist I might say, but those were the times!) Yet Johnston begins to apply his theories of 3 levels of music, (just) intonation and tonality to other pieces in contemporary or Avant Garde repertoire. He mentions Harry Partch, who devised his own almost-orchestra full of uniquely tuned instruments. The other caveat I take with the obsession over intonation: will these systems ever take? I find it impossible to believe that someday an ensemble will undertake the choice to decipher Partch's notation (despite the program notes he gives), reinvent the instruments, and perform or record his music? Don't get me wrong, the guy was inventive, cutting-edge and unique, but I have no real intention of creating a Eucal Blossom to perform Avant Garde music on. For a complete list of instruments, if you're feeling particularly ambitious and enjoy working with your hands, check out Harry's fun little orchestra

America's greatest failure: our composers in the limelight

It was an almost strange sensation of familiarity as soon as I saw the section on Aaron Copland headlining one in part of chapter 3 in Gann's book. Somehow the music in this chapter (Populists - 1930's) was both familiar and regrettably unknown.

All see Copland as the quintessential American composer. If you haven't listened to any excerpts from Music for Theater before the culmination of your 5th grade music education, that might be a sincere issue for that music educator. But I digress; I was not shocked to realize how Copland evolved over his long compositional career, taking on an almost serial technique in pieces like Connotations, or utilizing an eleven-tone row. Once you set yourself up for musical success, no popular audience is going to want to sit down in a concert hall and hear pseudo-serialist music when it's preceded by Fanfare for the Common Man.

More important, are the lesser known American composers whose works failed to endure the test of time and survive decades as "quintessential American music". Roy Harris was to be hailed as the great American Symphonist. Now, amateurs and young professionals alike may not have even heard of him, nevermind his works and compositional style. What happened to Elie Siegmeister (a name that was entirely unfamiliar to me until reading this chapter)? David Diamond? It makes me feel uncomfortable as a musician and American that I've never heard of these people.
How did they come to fame in the first place? For some, it was location, location location, just as we discussed regarding Ives and New England Composers. Copland was from New York, a prime location for fertile musical development. Virgil Thomson was from Missouri, of all places, but was lucky enough to be loaned the support to go to Harvard (because we all know not much was going on in Missouri while Thomson was a young lad...)

Yet location can't be all of it; So what went wrong?

Was it the depression? When the market crashed, so did all or most of any kind of disposable income that could be used for arts, music, entertainment or patronage of these fine arts. And of course you can't discount the financial, emotional and physical toll the crash had on individuals and families in general.

Was it a change in American musical standards? Perhaps at the time of composition and/or success, these composers embodied the American ideals, but this in no way would stay constant in the coming centuries. This theory is discounted by the success of Copland, Gershwin and countless other jazz and classical musicians.

I've battled with a few other ideas: cultural boundaries, race or gender issues (e.g. William Grant Still or Ruth Crawford), socio-economic factors and the whole gamut of financial reasons a composer might struggle.

So I guess the jury is still out...Why exactly do the works some American composers still survive and thrive in the current decade, but other, equally important composers fade into the chapters of a music history textbook?

Cowell, Varèse and the overtone series

When embarking upon the readings for this weekend, I read the articles in a seemingly strange order, but became very revealing by the end of the saga. Henry Cowell's article appeared a little to vague at first, although I do not believe his objective was to be specific about new music. Varese had a different outlook, but was more specific about his purpose and means behind his composition. Kyle Gann's chapter was very summative of all three, making sense of their compositions in a general and historical way.

I began with Cowell's article, New Music Resources, and was struck by the overwhelming idea which he presented: going back as far as the overtone series as a resource for creating the new wave of 20th century techniques.
Cowell didn't curb to the enormous pressure to "break away from tradition", but rather emphasized using 'new resources' and noise-making devices to create new music. This is why I found his emphasis on the overtone series quite ironic and striking. Does he insist that we have been neglecting or concealing the very nature by which all sounds come from in our many traditional forms of music?
Clearly from his compositional style, he did not acknowledge, blatantly reference traditional forms of the past, but that was not the point of the article.

Varese, on the other hand, developed a much more clear argument about breaking from tradition and developing one's own musical language. The dulcet pianissimo of a violin is no longer the 'norm' in music moving forward; Varese felt free enough to use new access of new sounds and technology available to him to create his musical language. In his article, he stressed the importance of music as an art-science, which I think is a wonderful description of 20th century music moving forward into the century. Technology and scientific development is a massive part of our growing musical culture, whether we like it or not, and as responsible musicians who want to further musical opportunities in the future need to acknowledge that.

With this in mind, it is pretty unbelievable that orchestras exist playing centuries old instruments, performing music written entirely by dead guys. If this case was true of other technologies or arts, we would still be using phones invented by Alexander Graham Bell himself, and riding model T's down an unpaved road.
As a quote in the Gann alluded to, Varese was not "ahead" of his time, everyone else was simply behind.
Clearly, his music supports this progressive style, reflected in the more extreme pieces such as Poeme electronique, whereas I see Hyperism as more of a reflection towards the tradition.
I honestly feel badly that Varese's music is underappreciated, and as Gann referenced, he is regarded as largely a "nihilist" composer. While he understood that his art-science music would not be accepted by all, there were still too many listeners rooted in the past. After all, who wouldn't want to snuggle up with a good book and listen to music written by this handsome man?
The idea that music is composed for personal enjoyment only can almost be stretched back to Ives' point of view, where he was grateful and appreciative of any few performances of his pieces given. The Brussells fair was a great step for Varese and his music, unfortunately it didn't step others into his current state of music that is both art and science.