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Dig the New Breed, Part 2  George Clinton One important question remained for me: How musically educated does one have to be to enjoy this music? The Serialists expected their listeners to have at least a graduate student level of musical knowledge to appreciate their largely theoretical exercises in composition. Was this true of the new composers? To find out, I talked to a few people who ought to know: those who compose, conduct, and perform new music on a daily basis. An observation I heard more than once is that concert music had not kept pace with the times. Part of the problem, in other words, is that "classical" radio stations and symphony orchestras have not been programming this music for their listeners, making it seem even more inaccessible than it is. "Every other field -- literature, painting, dance -- is up-to-date except classical music," said Alvin Singleton, a highly respected composer in his mid-fifties living in Atlanta. Randall Fleischer, conductor of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, 20 years younger and based in Poughkeepsie, New York, said much the same thing. "It's ludicrous that symphonic music stands as the only discipline where audiences don't clamor for something new." The Joffrey Ballet never tours with only the standard repertory, he pointed out; new works are what generate excitement in ballet and, of course, in theater. At 35, Fleischer's commitment to the modern is as apparent as his shoulder-length black hair and the cowboy boots peeking out from under the trousers of his formal attire. As an "avid rock fan" growing up in Canton, Ohio, he leaned toward bands like Queen and Aerosmith (whom he still loves) and didn't get intensely interested in symphonic music until he was in high school. When I told Fleischer that I began to wonder during the '80s whether the audience for new music needed some kind of specialized listening skills, he interjected, "Maybe just bad taste." At subscription concerts for the HVP, Fleischer invariably begins the program with a work by a living composer, from the venerable David Diamond to Joan Tower, before moving on to the reliable concert warhorses. The "new" pieces tend to be rather accessible, a system that appears to work with his orchestra's middle-aged subscribers. A composer in his own right who has been known to program an occasional Frank Zappa piece at his Young People's Concerts in the region, Fleischer is at home in the modern repertory but has little patience for academic composers. "I've been just sort of shameless," he said by phone, "in dismissing so much of the last 30 years of classical music as being the Emperor's New Clothes. Some people think I'm a charlatan for saying so, but that's what I think it is. I'm happy to recognize people like Michael Torke and David Ott and Joan Tower and [Pulitzer Prize winner] Shulamit Ran, who have regathered in their composer's minds what music is. And that is a combination of an intellectual experience and an emotional experience. So many of the academics -- composers who are tenured professors at colleges and who don't really need to connect to their audience because they get their paycheck regardless -- have really lost what music is about. It's tragic that the last thirty years of symphonic music have turned audiences in the other direction. And if you look at the history of music, it's a very bizarre chapter." Fleischer's contention, echoed by others with whom I spoke, is that Bach and Mozart were not writing for their own colleagues on some academic faculty. "They were writing, if nothing else, for their patrons. And if their employers did not find their music pleasing, they were out of a job." He applauds composers who have resisted the temptation to write for the lowest common denominator of musical taste but, he adds, "Beethoven was crushed when his music was not accepted. So was Mozart. They wrote to their inner muse but they wanted the audience to connect to their music. You get the feeling with some of the classical music of the last 30 years that if the audience likes it, the composer thinks it's not a good piece." Fleischer distinguishes between the use of a mathematically derived system of composition in the service of a dramatic structure, as often occurred with Schoenberg or, say, in Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, and Serial music that "went to the nth degree." He prefers American composers like Tower, Ott, and Stephen Albert, whom he classifies as neo-Romantics. Neo-Romanticism is a term that gets thrown around frequently in the music press without much definition and, in fact, it is somewhat vague. Technically, the term refers to a trend that began to take shape in the 1980s, both as a reaction against extreme modernism and as an attempt to gain a wider audience for new music by returning to late-19th-century Romantic musical values. But it's not always easy to separate those neo-Romantic composers who set out expressly to write in the style of Mahler or other late-19th century masters from those who incorporate elements of Romanticism in their writing without falling into a nostalgic coma. Listening to CDs of works by Tower or Stephen Albert, for example, you would be hard put to label them reactionary, even if their music is clearly more inviting than that of academic dons like Wuorinen and Babbitt. Several young, pop-influenced composers now incorporate elements that could be labeled neo-Romantic in their work. Just mentioning the neo-Romantics to anybody involved with new music, however, is likely to bring a sneer to the lips. And listening to some neo-Romantic music--say, David Ott's Second and Third Symphonies -- it's easy to understand the displeasure of both academics and the downtown crowd for this safe, pleasant music that sounds like you've heard it all before. An instructive parallel to the shifting tensions between popular recognition and critical acceptance is apparent in the career of one 20th century American composer whose work is often left out of such discussions. George Gershwin wrote enduring popular theater songs alongside symphonic compositions that have retained their freshness as much as seventy years later, and for his pains, he caught it from both sides. He was often dismissed by classical music critics who questioned the use of folk themes and jazz rhythms in his orchestral works and his inclusion of popular songs as arias within his opera, Porgy and Bess. At the same time, his continuing interest in symphonic composition, his association with and admiration for Ravel, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, and the sheer audacity of Porgy and Bess led the Hollywood studios to question his ability to communicate on a popular level. Gershwin, however, was completely comfortable in both worlds; when a Hollywood agent wired him in 1936 that the studios were afraid he would write only "highbrow songs," George wired back famously, "RUMORS ABOUT HIGHBROW MUSIC RIDICULOUS. STOP. AM OUT TO WRITE HITS."  Ken Amis Such a brazenly two-fisted (some might say two-faced) approach to composition didn't help Gershwin's symphonic stature any more than it did Leonard Bernstein's a generation later. Aaron Jay Kernis, a 35-year-old who writes relatively accessible pieces which sometimes process pop materials, has been caught in a similar crossfire. The "downtown" music crowd feels that he has sold out and the academics write him off as a crowd-pleaser -- a likely sign that he must be doing something right. Kernis once wrote a statement of intent that could almost serve as a manifesto for the new breed of composers who abjure academic music while embracing the wealth of musical idioms now available in recorded form. "I love the emotional inclusiveness of music of the past," he wrote in part, "and have grown weary of the intellectualization that has limited the expression and communicativeness of so much music in this century." He recently elaborated on that statement. "For me there is never enough music that is about the soul," he told the New York Times. "So much music is mind-music, and some of it is very interesting, but that's just it. It doesn't move me. It doesn't take me somewhere I haven't been before. It's just an exercise for my mind. I want to write music that is visceral, that is moving and that is impeccably put together. I don't want classical music to be a passive experience. I want it to have as much of an impact as the best rock concerts." The good news is that Kernis's music often engages the mind while it touches the soul and the senses, as a listen to his String Quartet or Symphony in Waves will readily attest. And he's not alone in his feelings about musical diversity. I spoke with a composer named George S. Clinton (not to be confused with funk music master George Clinton), who works in Hollywood scoring feature films and television and writes concert music. Clinton told me that he feels both grateful and occasionally overwhelmed by the proliferation of recordings now available on the market. "I think it's a great time to be a composer or a listener," he said of the sudden availability of so much recorded music -- traditional and modern concert music, jazz from all eras, film scores, show music, and ethnic music from around the world. "But it's also frustrating because you've only got so much time" to hear everything. Maybe the question is not so much how you're going to use that time but how this music should be listened to in the first place. We're so familiar with the Romantic, Classical, and Baroque literatures that they require little effort; many of those pieces function admirably as background music for working, driving, running, eating dinner, making love, or just watching the snow fall. But try making love to a piece by Louis Andriessen or Michael Torke and you could end up with a hernia. If you're going to make the commitment to listen to this often demanding music, you have to commit to listening. Let it play in the background while you do your taxes or anything else that requires a sizable part of your attention and I guarantee that within a matter of minutes you'll be jumping out of your chair to turn the damn thing off. Nor should you expect one listen to be enough in most cases (although the more accessible stuff, like Arvo Part's liturgical music or the Kernis Quartet, may get and hold your attention from the start). After all, a little patience is only fair. All those Vivaldi concerti and Brahms sonatas that we've been listening to for half our lives have a big head start. Come to think of it, the first time I heard a Bach cantata, I was appalled. Used to hearing those comfortable little Bach keyboard pieces, so neat and symmetrically satisfying, I found the cantata unruly and overblown. In a similar fashion, some new composed music can sound overly busy at first hearing, with too many variables: a floating tonal center or none at all, vast dynamic leaps, constantly shifting rhythms, and a lack of a discernible overall structure. Many of the pieces sound impressionistic and vaguely meandering, like avant-garde jazz without the fury, and it's only after paying close attention to what's going on that they begin to acquire a distinctive shape.  Henryk Gorecki Ironically, that very feeling of what critic Kyle Gann has called "scattershot diffuseness" is what made most Serial, or 12-tone, music so unappealing. Like it or not, we all seem to need some center or home base to which to return occasionally. Sonny Rollins and Art Tatum were masters of this in the jazz idiom. Yet even the great Tatum was challenged by critics who thought his over-the-top improvisational maelstroms at the keyboard abandoned the beat altogether. When the recordings were played against a metronome, however, it was immediately clear that he always touched back down precisely on the beat; his critics just couldn't hear it. Does that mean that highly specialized listening skills are required after all? George Clinton finds the question compelling but wants to rephrase it. "I think it comes down to another question," he says, "which is, Why am I listening to this? Am I listening to it for entertainment? Am I listening to it to further my understanding of music? Or to try to comprehend what this artist was trying to communicate?" And in saying that, he feels he has put his finger on a key problem with the past few decades. "I think a lot of composers are not necessarily trying to communicate anything," he says. "And so, as you listen to a piece, you can't connect to it except on an academic level, which is satisfying only up to a point. For art to speak to its audience, there has to be an emotional note that resonates at some level -- even if it's totally cynical. If you set out to write a piece that's totally void of emotion, that could be interesting too." Clinton recalls going to hear a German band that specialized in feedback, something that most "serious" musicians try to avoid. Once he got past the ugliness of the sound, got over his prejudice against it and was able to hear what they were doing, the music became fascinating to him. "One guy was screaming and the other two guys had microphones connected to amplifiers and they were shaping the feedback around his screaming," he says. "I thought, Wow, this is interesting. It's like Minimalism. It's also sort of a Zen experience: At first, it's just interesting and then it gets boring and then it becomes frustrating. I became angry and wanted to leave and yet I made myself sit there. At some point, I broke through into a whole other place where I was just floating along with the music. Yet I had to go down into this anger or frustration or boredom and come out the other side of it to appreciate it." Then he admits that he had a similar experience one night at the Hollywood Bowl while listening to the third act of Wagner's Die Walkure. It may be, as Clinton implies, that many listeners find themselves alienated from a style of music that they once were able to embrace. I asked Ken Amis, the young tuba player and composer from the Bahamas, whose Quintet No. 2 for Brass was recently recorded by the Empire Brass, what he looked for in composers or incorporated in his own writing to counter a listener's sense of alienation. For Amis, the touchstone is "pitch reference," the connection to a tonal center (even an occasionally shifting one) that lets the listener return to something "that feels like home." "That's what allows the listener to follow you," Amis says. "Most listeners can even tell how far away you are" from that center at any given point. During the so-called "common practice period," the 300-year span when the most familiar music of the European canon was written, that referent was the key you were in at any given moment. "Everything gravitates toward that, and composers use that gravity to cause tension," Amis adds, "so that everyone feels the pull back to the pitch reference. What happened in the experimental period of the 1950s and '60s was that a lot of composers sought to totally eliminate that reference point."  |
