 Dig the New Breed I spent my first year and a half of college at a Catholic university in Jamaica, Queens, in 1964 and '65. On the radio, James Brown was singing about a brand new bag and Barry McGuire was warning us that we were on the eve of destruction. The Rolling Stones were telling people to get off their cloud, Martha and the Vandellas had nowhere to run, and Elvis was crying in the chapel. The British Invasion overlapped Motown and Dylan, and the great girl groups like the Shangri-Las and the Crystals settled into the Top Ten alongside surf music from Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys, the homegrown garage sounds of Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, and the incipient psychedelia of the Byrds. A Catholic college was, needless to say, precisely the wrong place to be during this explosion of forbidden sounds, a sensuous smorgasbord later capsulized (and immortalized) in the anthemic tribute of English dancehall singer-turned-rocker Ian Dury as "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll." I was going through Freshman Orientation in the fall of 1964 when something occurred that made me think that maybe this environment wouldn't be as backward as I anticipated. During one session, we were told in detail how attending college would broaden our musical and artistic horizons. We would discover a world beyond our adolescent fascination with pop music; we would explore not only the classics but also the cutting edge of new music. (Nobody mentioned jazz, of course, probably because in those blissfully incorrect days, jazz was thought of by academics as merely an adjunct to pop music.) The woman giving the orientation lecture ticked off the names of the usual suspects, from Bach to Brahms to Bartok, before adding a few words about electronic music, mentioning Stockhausen and Varese by name. Scanning the roomful of mostly Catholic high school graduates, she realized, no doubt, that she had overreached. "Some of you may not be aware of those last two names," she said thoughtfully.  Steve Martland Then she caught me in her sights. "You probably know who they are, though." My vague smile covered a fervent prayer that she wouldn't ask me anything about them. For whatever mystical insight moved her to single me out, the truth was that I didn't know anything more about Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgard Varse than my blank-faced coreligionists. But I made a solemn vow to live up to this woman's prescient observation at my earliest opportunity. Not long afterward, I bought recordings of Stockhausen's Kontacte and Varese's Ionisation and Deserts, later adding Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage and all the weird "new" composers who sounded as if they were doing interesting things. I had no idea what I was listening to, but I felt it was somehow significant. It was a little like reading your first Ionesco play or tasting your first glass of imported ale. It's strange, but some nameless quality about it makes you suspect you'll get to like it one day. Nonetheless, after the first flush of excitement wore off, I found little to like in the new music that was being composed and recorded in the '60s and '70s. No doubt because of my Catholic upbringing, I assumed that it was my fault and even managed to feel guilty that I couldn't "relate to" the obviously sophisticated music created by Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and other composers whose names I had no reason to remember. My passionate infatuation with "new and different" sounds -- the aural parallel of my obsession with modernist poetry and Theater of the Absurd -- was diverted into a deepening exploration of jazz. In high school, I dug my older brother's Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck records--cool, accessible classics that I still admit to enjoying. In the late '60s, along with a number of my contemporaries, I discovered John Coltrane, and the floodgates opened. The combination of Coltrane and psychedelic drugs changed forever the way I would hear music. Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra followed. When I began writing about jazz professionally in 1970, I found that most of the mainstream was already being covered by critics with entrenched positions at newspapers and magazines, so I staked out the avant-garde as my turf and dug in. By the mid-'70s, I had worked my way out to the far fringes of the avant-garde, music that I no longer enjoy but which, at the time, exercised an uncommon fascination for me. Much of it was at least as hard to listen to as any of the Serialist and electronic music that I had already given up on. But it offered one quality that those composers lacked: passion. Even at its furthest remove from the tonal and rhythmic center, jazz generally managed to communicate some level of emotional truth. To be sure, jazz had its own intellectualized performers, like Anthony Braxton, who gave his compositions titles that resembled notations from advanced calculus and who seemed to have more in common with the Serialists than with other jazz musicians. But by then, I had come to the conclusion that, whatever its occasional lapses, jazz was the most significant music of the 20th century. I had also decided that were it not for the fact that it was played predominantly by black musicians in a subculture of smoky clubs and heat-deprived lofts, and that it often reached its highest levels of eloquence very late at night, when respectable critics and listeners were already in the dream state, it would be acknowledged by the academics who dominated the music departments at the major universities. By the late 1970s, jazz had learned from its avant-garde, corrected many of its overindulgences and moved on. Young players like David Murray, Arthur Blythe, Chico Freeman, Olu Dara, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, and Leroy Jenkins were finding ways to integrate avant-garde advances with the basics of melody and swing. They tended to abandon the more theoretical approach and many of the stylistic excesses of the avant-garde for an unabashedly emotional style and a renewed affection for melody, harmony, and swing. In 1977 and '78, I began producing recordings of these performers for an independent label. There was even less money in recording the music than there was in writing about it, but I experienced firsthand the excitement of being in on what seemed like a significant development in jazz history.  Randall Fleischer I hadn't noticed any similar development in the field of new music, or contemporary classical music, or whatever other uncomfortable term was supposed to cover modern music composed in the European tradition. (I resented the term "serious music" because I thought jazz was equally "serious," if a lot more fun. I'm much more comfortable now with the current scholarly designation "concert music.") I occasionally heard new music that moved me: stunning pieces by Gyorgy Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, to name two. But they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the music of the past few decades was being created by academics for other academics. The Serialists -- composers who wrote 12-tone, or Serial, music based largely on mathematical principles and short on emotional color -- controlled university music departments and oversaw the grant process that determined that only those young composers who wrote in a similar style (i.e., their own students) would be promoted. For the first time in centuries, music was being made not to please or move or even disturb an audience but to impress other composers. But what about that? Haven't poets and playwrights and painters and composers traditionally said that they create work for the few close friends who can understand the real import of it? Hasn't most art always been imbued with a large element of elitism? Well, yes and no. The growing romanticism in the West about the tortured artist, the ignored artist, about creators so far ahead of their time that the world has told them to take their art and shove it, has tended to cloak the fact that plenty of great artists, from Shakespeare to Gershwin, have found a measure of acceptance and even prosperity in their day. In the perennial struggle between artistic innovation and public acceptance, suffering and rejection make for better human drama than simple success; any number of novels and movies can be and have been spun from unbearably sad stories of artistic rejection. (And they're often genuinely entertaining. My favorite moment of this genre is the brilliant opening to Robert Altman's film Vincent and Theo, which portrays an anguished Van Gogh dying in near squalor while on the soundtrack his painting Sunflowers is being auctioned for bids that escalate to $40,000,000.) Adverse public reaction to works that later were widely embraced, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, has overshadowed the plain fact that most of the canon of European classical music was enthusiastically received by the patrons for whom it was written. (In Stravinsky's case, the two ballets he composed prior to Le Sacre, namely, The Firebird and Petrouschka, were immediate hits with the audience.) Never before the middle of this century had the romance of rejection, combined with a hubris bred of academic isolation, so overtaken reality that composers felt no responsibility to and no connection with the public.  David Lang Recently the thought occurred to me that I'd been suffering from a peculiar hubris of my own. Having rejected modern concert music years back in favor of jazz, and then having carefully constructed a bunker of reasons to defend that decision, I assumed that the situation hadn't much changed. True, Minimalism represented an attempt to break out of the academic mold, but it was sort of boring and repetitious. I was amused and entertained by some of Steve Reich's early pieces but I couldn't get seriously interested in Philip Glass. And there wasn't really any other new music of consequence being written. Was there? When I agreed to examine for this article the field of recently composed music (that is to say, music outside of the largely improvisatory jazz idiom), I began by listening to CDs by a wide range of living composers and performers released by companies like Point Music (Philip Glass's label, carried by Philips Classics), Elektra Nonesuch (under the direction of veteran producer Bob Hurwitz), Catalyst (the brainchild of Newsday music critic and my former colleague, Tim Page), CRI, Argo, and ECM New Series (a label begun by the prolific jazz producer Manfred Eicher). Among the composers I heard many for the first time, are Louis Andriessen, Todd Levin, Steve Martland, Jeffrey Mumford, David Lang, Joan Tower, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Adams, Gavin Bryars, Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, Alvin Singleton, Tania Leon, Michael Torke, James Schonfield, Evan Ziporyn, Jaron Lanier, Alvin Curran, Giya Kancheli, David Ott, Nicholas Maw, and the various composer/performers whose work has been recorded live at the Bang On a Can Festival. Ranging in age from twenty-something to over sixty and in geographic origin from California to Eastern Europe, these composers represent a startling range of styles and approaches that evade easy labeling. Some but by no means all of them incorporate pop elements in their work (see accompanying article by Mark Swed) or are informed by exposure to so-called "world music" (from the treasury of ethnic music now readily available on recording). Others blend conventional harmony and melody with dissonance and unfamiliar rhythmic patterns. Some of the works I listened to employ small doses of improvisation, a surprising amount of vocalese, or refreshing instrumentation (piccolo, harp, and bass drum; two flutes; solo electric guitar; bass clarinet and marimba; harmonica and 12 boomboxes). Much of the music on these CDs is bracing and invigorating; some of it is ravishing. But a good percentage is too disjointed to absorb readily, and a lot of it is as stiff and inaccessible as ever. After repeated listenings, however, the music becomes unexpectedly approachable; given enough exposure, it begins to open up, like a tannic cabernet meeting the air. Or maybe it was my ears that needed to breathe a little before they got comfortable with some of these sounds, which can be as complex and challenging as post-Bop jazz, but in a very different idiom. |
